


the sweet science

by grace



Category: Bandom
Genre: Animal Death, Drug Use, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 03:51:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grace/pseuds/grace
Summary: originally posted on lj on 27th-May-2009





	1. Chapter 1

Ballato says, “Schechter. This coffee tastes like a Martian milked it out your ass.” 

 

Brian says, “What, like you could have done better.” The last time Ballato made coffee she set the kitchen in the station on fire. Then she lit her cigarette off it and left. 

 

Ballato says, “Whatever, homeskillet. If it came out my ass it’d taste like daisies, all I'm saying.” 

 

They sit in silence, waiting for the light to change. The rain glows in their headlights and off the rain slicker of the guy sitting at the bus stop outside Brian’s window singing Britney Spears along with his transistor radio. It's five a.m. “Good morning, Chicago,” says Schechter, taking a fortifying gulp of his own awful coffee. “Whatever, we can go to Starbucks.” 

 

Ballato is singing _womanizer womanizer womanizer_ under her breath. 

 

“Quit it,” Schechter says. The radios hiss and spit. The rain makes a sound on the windshield that would be cozy if Brian didn't know how many times he’ll be getting in and out of the cruiser before it even gets light, how much of that shit he’ll get down the collar of his ill-fitting uniform with its ill-fitting regulation CPD rain poncho. His head feels fuzzy, heavy. 

 

Last night wasn’t the greatest. Duke kept waking up, whining in pain, wouldn’t swallow his pills. Bob finally called Dr. Melburne, the miracle worker at the all-night vet place, and she called in a suppository, and Brian went out to get it. One a.m. All-night pharmacy florescence, the lethargic gum-snap of the pharmacy tech. Exhaustion to the point of despair. When he drove back with the medicine, he circled the block a few times, thinking _I could just leave all this. I could drive all the way back to Detroit and then I’ll never have to see the look in his eyes when that damn dog finally dies._

 

He parked his car and went up to the apartment. Bob had Duke on the bed, was holding his head, just lightly, Duke’s big jowly face cupped between Bob’s palms. Bob glanced up at Brian in the doorway, smiled a warm little smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and looked back down at Duke, at his own fingers stroking Duke’s head. 

 

Brian thought about how it would never have crossed Bob’s mind for a second that Brian could be down there in his car in the rain thinking about leaving Bob, and even if it did he would have scolded himself for the thought, for questioning Brian’s loyalty. Brian crossed the room, cupped his hand around the back of Bob’s head. He pulled Bob against his chest, so that Bob could hear the steady thumping of his heart, a promise more absolute than Brian could make in words. They stayed like that for a while, quiet in the lamplit room, Brian holding Bob like Bob was holding Duke, Dixie sound asleep in her corner. Then Brian kissed the crown of Bob’s head and said, “Come on, buddy, let’s do this.” 

 

They got Duke in the bathtub and Bob held him while Brian worked the suppository in. Duke hated it, grunted and thrashed around as much as he could, looking up at Bob, amazed and pleading, _what the fuck is this new bullshit and why are you letting it happen to me_? Bob kissed his head and said gently, “Suck it up, babydoll, it’s almost done.” 

 

The medicine helped, took the pain down so Duke could sleep, and he was out like a light before Bob could even get him from the bathtub back to the bed, Brian still in the bathroom, stripping off the rubber glove, leaning on the sink. Bob came back in, wrapped his arm around Brian’s chest, rubbed his palm comfortingly over the thump of Brian’s heart. “C’mon back to bed, Schechter,” he whispered low in Brian’s ear, reassuring. They went back to bed and slept for a few hours, Brian wrapped around Bob, Bob wrapped around Duke. 

 

Now, in the cruiser with Ballato, Brian can’t get it off his mind, the fierce, heartbroken love in Bob’s eyes when he held Duke’s face in his hands. Fucking goddamn hell Brian hates being in love sometimes, better to run your goddamn heart through the toaster yourself and get it over with. 

 

Ballato says, “Starbucks time, what’s your poison,” pulling into the drivethru. 

 

They drink caramel macchiatos, break up a fight on a basketball court, answer a domestic. Brian calls Bob later in the morning, when he knows Bob’s on the bus to Worm's. 

 

“Schechter,” says Bob in greeting. 

 

It was the way Bob said his name that first clued Brian in to the fact that Bob liked him. That certain kind of amusement, affection mixed with sarcasm, a particular specific weight and measure he gave the syllables, even before they knew each other well. 

 

“What’s up,” says Brian. Beside him, Ballato is tap-tapping the wheel, looking out the window, pretending not to listen. 

 

“Nothing,” says Bob. On his end there’s bus noise: the engine hum, the mechanical voice calling out street names, people talking on their way to work. 

 

Brian clears his throat. “Was Duke still asleep when you left?” 

 

“Yeah,” says Bob. 

 

Brian waits, because he can tell from the sound of Bob’s voice that there’s more to say, Bob’s just arranging it in his head. 

 

“I don’t know about leaving him alone all day anymore, while we’re both gone,” Bob finally says. 

 

“Uh-huh,” says Brian. 

 

“I asked the kid upstairs to check on him,” Bob says. “Just during the day.” 

 

Brian absorbs this. “How will he get in?” 

 

“I gave him a key,” says Bob, lightly. He’s using his I-know-Brian-Schechter-will-disapprove-of-this-course-of-action, but-I’m-just-going-to-pretend-it-is-not-happening voice. 

 

“What kid from upstairs?” asks Brian. 

 

“Kid with the hair. Crawford.” 

 

“Do you know him? I’ve never talked to him. I didn’t even know that was his name.” Brian keeps his voice carefully non-confrontational, but he feels anxious, annoyed. 

 

Bob allows space for the particular weighted pause that signifies, _Brian, you paranoid asshole_ , and says, “I’ve talked to him before. He’s a good kid.” 

 

“Yeah,” says Brian. “Everybody’s a good kid at some point in their lives, Bryar. I deal with good kids all day.” 

 

“You’re being a paranoid asshole,” says Bob fondly. 

 

“We’ll talk about this later,” says Brian. 

 

“Whatever,” says Bob. “I live with a cop, like I’m gonna be scared of some ninety-pound nineteen-year-old Guitar Hero champion breaking into my apartment and tarnishing my honor.” 

 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” says Brian dryly. He hears the automated voice announce Bob’s street crossing. 

 

“Catch you later, Schechter,” says Bob. 

 

There’s a bunch of other stuff Brian wants to say, like _did you eat breakfast_ , and _wrap your wrists carefully_ , and _what the actual hell were you thinking giving some random dude a key to our home_ , but he squelches it all down with the ease of practice. “Love you,” he says. 

 

“You too,” says Bob. Brian can see him swinging off the bus, gym bag over his shoulder, too big hoodie with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. 

 

Brian snaps his phone shut, pinches his nose, exhales. 

 

“What’d the wife do this time?” asks Ballato, gentle, amused. 

 

“Nothing,” says Brian. “Not be a cynical bastard.” 

 

“Oooh, can’t have that,” says Ballato. “God forbid.” 

 

A car passes them blazing Kanye and Ballato bangs her head energetically, sings _when did you become a robocop, I don’t need no robocop_. 

 

“Would you quit that?” says Brian, raising his voice over the sound of her exuberance. 

 

“You’re just a Robocop, Schechter,” she says, fondness in her voice. 

 

* 

 

When Brian gets off duty, he half expects the Crawford kid to be in his apartment, lurking, stealing the Playstation or Bob’s Percocet. He is not. Brian braces himself for the second possibility, that Duke has died during the day, but when he comes into the bedroom, Dixie tagging eagerly along at his heels, Duke is bright-eyed and alert on the bed, head in Bob’s lap while Bob unwraps his hands and wrists. 

 

“You’re home early,” says Brian, stopping in the doorway, covering up his surprise. 

 

“Yup,” says Bob, glancing up. His eyes are warm when they light on Brian, crinkle at the corners with that look of direct, unabashed affection that can still make Brian’s heart beat faster. “Worm had someplace to be, he cut us all loose.” 

 

Worm is Bob’s trainer, ex-repo man turned championship boxer, an affable fellow, retired now, running a gym in Canaryville. 

 

“Everything good?” asks Brian.

 

“Perfect,” says Bob. The wrappings are lying in a pile on the bed, and he’s flexing his right wrist, rubbing it. 

 

“Don’t put your wraps on the bed,” says Brian automatically. Bob’s just as OCD as Brian is, but some things don’t bother him, like his own blood. Brian figures he’s become accustomed to the sight of it. Brian hates when it gets on the sheets. 

 

“Sorry,” says Bob, picking them up and stuffing them in the pocket of his gym bag, open on the floor. The movement shifts Duke’s head in Bob’s lap, and he makes a plaintive noise. Bob rests his hand gently on Duke’s side in apology. 

 

Brian crosses the room, sits down next to Bob on the bed. He takes Bob’s right hand in his, rubs the tendons of the wrist with his thumbs. He blows gently on Bob’s knuckles where they’re torn up, scabbed and bloody. 

 

Bob’s breath catches and he says, “Fucker! Don’t do that, it tickles,” but he doesn’t pull his hand away. 

 

“What do you want for dinner?” Brian asks, voice hushed. 

 

“Something gross,” says Bob finally. “Bad Chinese.” 

 

“Clean your hands,” says Brian, standing. 

 

“I will,” says Bob, resting his palm back on Duke’s drooping head. 

 

“Now, please,” demands Brian mirthlessly. 

 

“Fuck off, Officer,” retorts Bob, smoothing the thin hair around Duke’s ears, tucking his chin to hide his smile. 

 

They order in and eat it on the living room floor, after Bob’s taken a shower and Brian’s taken Dixie for a walk. Brian thinks they should talk about the kid from upstairs, but he wants Bob to bring it up. He thinks they should also talk about the surgery Worm told Brian about, and how Worm says Bob won’t even consider it, but Brian is too tired to fight. 

 

After they eat Bob lies on his back on the floor and asks, “How was your day, Chicago’s finest?” 

 

“Boring. Annoying. Exhausting.” Brian watches how Bob’s still messing with his wrist, shaking it out, unconsciously like he does, like he thinks he can shake the pain out. “Do you need a pill?” 

 

Bob stops shaking immediately, looks down at his hand, surprised. “No,” he say. “I’m good.” He rolls over on his side and looks at Brian. Brian looks back at him, puts down his fried rice carton, crawls over and flips Bob on his back, kisses him. 

 

Bob makes a warm, happy noise in his chest, slides his hands up Brian’s spine, and Brian rests all his weight on him, braces his forearms on either side of Bob’s head, slides his fingers into Bob’s hair, wet and clean from the shower. When Brian pulls back, Bob is smiling. 

 

“What, asshole?” asks Brian, roughly. 

 

“It’s been forty-eight hours since you kissed me,” says Bob seriously. “I was getting worried.” 

 

“What, now you’re keeping track?” asks Brian, amused. 

 

“I always keep track,” says Bob. He’s still smiling, but Brian can’t tell if he’s joking, read the particular shade of blue his eyes are. 

 

“Yeah, well, keep track of _this_ ,” says Brian, kissing him again. Bob makes a hungry noise, shifts beneath him, lifts his head off the floor, chasing. 

 

“Wanna move?” asks Brian, pulling back just enough to breathe the words into Bob’s mouth. 

 

“No,” says Bob. “Let’s fuck on the floor like teenagers.” 

 

“Good plan,” says Brian. 

 

They make out for a while. Bob loves kissing, loves being kissed, the kind of being kissed where the other person is doing most of the work and you can just zone out on the sensation of it. While Brian kisses him he thinks about how once you’ve been with someone for a long time, over a year, over two years, sex becomes like an equation: always the same steps in the same order to get the same result. There’s none of that breathless, adventurous feeling you get at the beginning, like the two of you are inventing sex, like this is the very first time a person has ever stuck their tongue in another person’s mouth. All that newness is gone now but Brian likes it this way: sex loses its urgency but not its magic, becomes something reassuring. 

 

Brian shifts, sticks his hand down Bob’s pants, and Bob grunts in approval, spreads his legs and plants his heels on the floor. Brian murmurs something, just a sound, and wiggles down between Bob’s thighs, hooking his thumbs in Bob’s sweatpants and dragging them off. They’re old and worn, soft like Bob’s skin. When Brian pulls them and Bob’s boxers off he lets his hand brush over the arch of Bob’s foot, where Bob is ticklish, hates to be touched. 

 

“Quit it!” growls Bob, kicking his foot out, and Brian catches it, laughing. 

 

“Princess,” he says, mocking. He holds onto Bob’s thrashing foot firmly, kisses the hollow where his ankle becomes his heel. 

 

“Sicko,” says Bob, the bluster leaving his body. “Touch my dick, you fucking weirdo.” 

 

Brian shucks off his shirt, unbuttons his jeans for quicker access later, slouches down and complies. He kisses Bob’s cock, the side, the head, ducks down and sucks him slow and easy. Above him Bob sighs, shifts. 

 

“Hey,” says Brian, pulling off, licking his lips. “Hey, c’mere, look at me.” 

 

Bob opens his eyes, looks down his belly at Brian. His eyes look soft, surprised, vulnerable, like he looks when he wakes up in the middle of a dream. Brian’s chest seizes; he thinks, _fuck you, after all this time, you need to stop doing this to me_. “I love you, okay,” he says instead. His voice sounds raw, serious. 

 

Bob’s laugh is a rumble. “Sensitive newage guy,” he says fondly. “I know you love me, suck my dick.” 

 

“Just trying to be a grownup about it,” says Brian mildly, and takes Bob down as far as he can go. Brian’s always been a pretty serious cocksucker, dedicated, focused, goal-oriented. The first time he went down on Bob, in the backseat of Brian’s car during Frankie Iero’s Halloween birthday bash three years ago, Bob raked his hand over his face after, laughed a wrecked, amused laugh and said, “Yeah, I thought you’d be good at that.” 

 

Bob twitches, his hand reaching to cup the side of Brian’s face, thumb running over Brian’s cheekbone. “Whatcha want?” asks Brian, a murmur, mouthing at the base of Bob’s cock. Instead of answering, Bob laces his fingers through Brian’s hair – short, scruffy, he still struggles to make it look like the hair of a cop and not of a punky, smartass twenty-year-old fresh from Detroit – and nudges gently downward. 

 

“Gotcha,” says Brian, breathes it into Bob’s skin, smiling, and he rearranges himself, Bob shifting obligingly. Brian exhales, hot and close, and opens Bob up with one wide, rough lick. Bob lets out a shuddery breath. His hand tightens in Brian’s hair, too hard, and Brian shifts his hips against the floor. He’s getting hard, trapped between the carpet and the zipper of his jeans, but he wants to ignore it, let it turn into an ache. He lifts his head, says, “Take your hoodie off.” 

 

Bob makes an impatient, displeased noise. 

 

“Hey,” says Brian. “This is my show, Bryar.” He sinks his teeth gently into the muscle below Bob’s knee, reprovingly. 

 

“Fine,” says Bob, disgruntled. He wriggles awkwardly out of his hoodie, throws it at Brian, runs his fingers through his hair. Brian shrugs the hoodie off his shoulders, looks unblinkingly at Bob: his soft, disheveled hair, impossibly fair, the softness of his belly, the freckles on his shoulders, the ropey muscles in his arms. Bob flushes a little, gives that little grouchy shiver he does when Brian looks at him too much, too intently, like he thinks he can shake Brian’s gaze off. “How’s that?” 

 

“Perfect,” says Brian, ducking back down. He nudges at Bob with his shoulder, says, “Hand,” and Bob slides his hand back into Brian’s hair, tugs lightly. 

 

This is maybe Brian’s favorite part: the fine, out-of-control tremble in Bob’s thighs, how with every push of Brian’s tongue Bob just opens and opens, his low senseless groans and mutters, the sting in Brian’s scalp from where Bob’s fingers are clenching and pulling desperately, the crick in Brian’s neck, his own spit running down his chin. When Bob starts breathing in shallow ragged pants in time with the strokes of Brian’s tongue, Brian pulls off, slides two fingers in, twists them carefully, deftly, and starts jerking Bob off with the other hand, resting his forehead on the slick sweaty skin of Bob’s thigh, eyes closed. Bob squirms, whispers something. His fingers slide out of Brian’s hair and his hand gently cups the back of Brian’s neck, and he comes, clenching around Brian’s fingers, one foot kicking out in a familiar, helpless gesture. 

 

Brian opens his mouth against Bob’s thigh, lets his teeth scrape over the flushed sweaty skin. Bob jumps a little, oversensitive, lets out a huff of laughter. Brian starts to pull his fingers out, slowly, carefully, but Bob says, his voice sounding low and sleepy, “Naw, come on, keep going.” 

 

Brian kisses Bob’s thigh in acknowledgment, presses his fingers in deeper, scissors them. “I gotta go get stuff,” he whispers. “Are you good?” 

 

“Yeah,” says Bob, laughing a little. “I’ll just wait right here.” 

 

“You better, you fucker,” says Brian, carefully extracting his fingers. He stands, looks down at Bob, sprawled on the carpet: the flutter of his breath evening out in his chest, his pale belly shining with the clear slick. His eyes are sleepy, smiley, but he narrows them at Brian, standing there in his unbuttoned jeans looking down at him. 

 

“What,” he says. “What what what.” 

 

_ I know everything there is to know about you _ , thinks Brian. _My tongue and my fingers and my eyes know every part of your body that can be known. If you died or went away, I would be left with this, a map of your skin inside the memory of my skin._ “Nothing,” he says, scratching his belly, adjusting his erection through his jeans. “You’re a hotass when you’ve just come your brains out.” 

 

“Hurry up,” grouches Bob, stretching his legs and spine out like a big cat. “I’m getting cold.” 

 

“Wanna move in here?” calls Brian, going through the dark hall into the bedroom. Duke is curled on the bed, snuffle-snoring, twitching, and Brian is careful not to touch him when he gets the lube from the drawer next to the bed, careful not to wake him up. 

 

“Naw,” says Bob’s voice from the living room. “This is exciting. Next thing you know we’ll be fucking on the kitchen table.” 

 

Brian drops the lube on the carpet next to him, unpeels his jeans. He kneels down – “Bend your knees,” he says shortly, and Bob complies – slicks his fingers up, slides them back in fast and smooth, adds a third. All of a sudden he feels strung-out, desperate to get inside Bob, mouth dry with lust. He feels Bob push down with his pelvis, grinding down onto Brian’s hand. Brian slides his palm up the sweat-slick back of Bob’s thigh, feels the muscles flexing, hooks his hand under Bob’s knee, pushes the leg up toward Bob’s chest, opening him up. Bob sighs, twitches, trying to work Brian’s fingers deeper inside him. “I’m ready, Schechter,” he says, quietly. 

 

“I know,” says Brian. He pops the lube back open, slicks himself up onehanded. They’ve been fucking without protection for over a year now, only the second relationship Brian’s ever had that’s been that serious, that committed. It still makes a little spark of lust ignite in his belly, tightening his balls, making his cock ache, that Bob trusts Brian enough to let him inside him like this, and that Brian trusts Bob enough to let him do the same. He kneewalks forward until he’s flush against Bob, skin against skin, pushes into him fast and smooth at the same time that he rocks forward, pressing Bob’s knees up and apart. 

 

Bob lets out an even breath, hooks his heel into Brian’s back, urging him closer, deeper. Brian widens his knees on the carpet to get his balance, pushes forward and in. Bob shakes and snarls, leans up to snap his teeth against the skin below Brian’s jaw, lets his head thump back on the carpet. 

 

Brian pauses, heart hammering in his chest. He can feel the impossibly sweet warmth and clench of Bob’s body around him, his balls resting snug against the curve of Bob’s ass; he can feel the muscles of Bob’s legs and back and belly flexing, tensing, loosening, letting him in. “You good?” he makes himself ask, voice tense and raw. 

 

“Perfect,” says Bob, breathless. 

 

Brian rolls out and then in again, deep, slow, timing himself to the rhythm of Bob’s body clenching and relaxing around him. Bob closes his eyes, shakes his head from side to side helplessly. “Jesus,” he says. “Jesus, yes.” 

 

Brian rocks forward, licks the sweat off Bob’s face, whispers, “You want this?” pushing in harder, emphasizing. 

 

Bob nuzzles his face against the side of Brian’s head, kisses his ear, his sweaty hair. “Yeah,” he says, quiet, serious. “I do. I’m always gonna.” 

 

Brian groans, clenches his jaw, keeps himself on his steady rhythm, rocking in deep, hard, slow. Bob is panting now, breath hot against the side of Brian’s neck. 

 

“How long has it been since I fucked you?” asks Brian, tense. “You keep track of that too?” It’s been a couple of weeks, he thinks, maybe a month even. They’ve been distracted, with Duke’s illness, and worry about Bob’s wrists, which never get better, always get worse. They’ve been too exhausted for anything more involved than handjobs, or Bob crawling into bed, wrapping his arms around Brian, rubbing off against the small of Brian’s back, his ass, when Brian was too tired to do anything but murmur encouragement, fall asleep before Bob even came. 

 

“Seventeen days,” says Bob, and there’s the edge to his voice that means he would be laughing if he weren’t getting fucked. 

 

“Sorry,” says Brian, rocking in hard, rougher, and Bob makes a sharp, helpless noise. 

 

“Like that,” he says. “Christ, come on, fuck me like you mean it.” 

 

“I mean it,” pants Brian, twisting his hips. He licks Bob’s jaw, bites down, gentle. Bob’s got one hand in Brian’s hair, the other on the small of Brian’s back, fingers flexing, blunt nails scraping across Brian’s skin. “I’m so fucking lucky,” says Brian, and comes, drops his face into the hollow of Bob’s throat. 

 

Bob is laughing, his body shuddering, folded under Brian. Brian makes a snarly noise and leans up on his arms, pulls out slow and careful. Bob is flushed, half-hard, eyes bright with amusement. “Wanna go again?” asks Brian. “I’ll suck you off even though you’re laughing at me.” 

 

“It’s okay,” says Bob. “Get me a washcloth and we’ll call it even.” 

 

Brian dips his head, kisses Bob’s chest, feels the vibration of his laughter. 

 

* 

 

Every weekday morning, Brian’s alarm wakes him up in what still feels like the middle of the night, 4am, complete darkness except for the streetlight leak through the blinds, the red smoke alarm glow. Brian jerks awake, hits the button on the clock before it can wake Bob. 

 

He lies there for a minute, heart hammering in his chest, listening to the occasional white noise of a car passing on the street below, the steady snuffle of Bob’s breathing. He’s lying on the other side of the bed, one arm slung over the entangled heap of dogs in the middle: Bob’s capitulation in the face of Dixie’s righteous indignation that Duke was now inexplicably allowed to sleep in the bed when she was not. 

 

Brian swings his legs out of bed, rubs a hand across his face. He’s been on the force for eight years and he still feels the same thing every morning before he goes in, the same mixture of dread and elation, a weight on his heart the size of the impossibility of the task. He takes a breath, thinks _one second one minute one hour one day at a time, and before you know it, there you go, you got a life._ The voice of good sense in his head sounds like Travis. He pisses, walks into the kitchen with his toothbrush in his mouth, starts the coffeemaker. He slides into his jeans and sweatshirt in the dark. Bob turns over in his sleep. Coffee, keys, shoes. He leans over the bed, kisses Bob’s forehead, runs his hand over Duke’s warm skull, whispers _love you_ in the dark. Bob answers, “You too,” possibly in his sleep. 

 

When Brian pulls into the station parking lot, Ballato is getting out of her car, bakery bag in her teeth, talking on the phone. Their eyes meet and they both sprint for the building. Brian skids around the corner, makes it an armlength ahead of her – “PIGFUCKER!” shouts Ballato, and then, into the phone, “No, not you, baby.” 

 

Brian saunters inside, remarks, “That’s two mornings in a row, Ballato, you’re losing your edge,” as Ballato snaps her phone shut. 

 

“Don’t piss me off, I’m on the rag,” she says. “Danish?” opening the waxy paper of the bakery bag. 

 

Everything feels more manageable once Brian’s in uniform and in the car, Ballato steering one-handed beside him. He takes a breath and lets it all out – the dullness in Duke’s eyes, what Bob’s orthopedist said, the memory of that first sip of beer in the back of his throat, relief like somebody taking a gun off his head. That’s all on hold for now. He listens to what’s coming in on the radio. 

 

* 

 

Part of what makes Brian a good cop is, he worries about people, to an unusual degree. Like, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night worrying about a woman he gave a parking ticket to three weeks ago. She just seemed really depressed. He wonders if he could find her name, call her on the phone, figure out what’s up, reassure her it’s not so bad. 

 

Travis always says – pointing with his cigarette, looking at Brian over his glasses – that Brian is codependent. Brian never knew quite what to think of that, or what he’s supposed to do about it if it’s true.

 

When Brian first came to Chicago, he was on night beat for a while, about a year. That was before he and Ballato were assigned to each other, back when he was still partners with Steineckert. Brian doesn’t remember a lot about that time, but what he does remember has the clarity and immediacy of much more recent experience: the sandwich Steineckert always ordered at the Greek deli (feta and tomato), or how it felt to be so tired all the time Brian thought he was going crazy, or that itchy, claustrophobic feeling they'd get right before the bars closed, like bracing helplessly for a huge and overwhelming wave to hit. He remembers how awkward but sweet it was when he invited Steineckert out one weekend and Steineckert accepted every beer he was offered, thanked the person who gave it to him, and then snuck into the kitchen and poured it down the drain. 

 

“It’s just easier than explaining,” said Steineckert to Brian, back in Brian’s car, when Brian was sloshed enough to ask about it. “If you explain, that starts a conversation. I don’t want to have a conversation about it. I don’t want to be the asshole explaining his belief system in the middle of the party.” Brian thinks about Steineckert often now when he turns down drinks at parties; his reasons for doing it are completely different, but he still feels a kinship.

 

They worked well together, liked each other, but they weren’t suited to be partners any more than Brian’s sleep clock was suited for night beat. They were both too serious, and their seriousness fed off each other until it became anxiety, obsession with the things they saw every day but couldn’t change. Brian’s clearest memory of Steineckert is of him crouching next to a kid at a Greyhound station, a fifteen-year-old runaway kid, little snotnosed skateboarding shit like both Schechter and Steineckert had once been. Brian had watched his face as he talked to the kid, and he knew that Steineckert would remember this kid for the rest of his life, would remember their conversation, and would think every now and then of things he could have said that would have made a bigger difference. It continually amazes Brian, even though he recognizes it in himself, this capacity of human beings to willingly assume illogical and unbearable burdens, even when there is nothing to be gained by it for anyone.

 

When Steineckert aced the detective’s exam and Brian was reassigned to Ballato, he finally understood what it was that had been missing, had been not quite right. Ballato didn’t consider herself personally responsible for the health and wellbeing of every human being she encountered while in uniform, because beneath her veneer of smartass cynicism, she had an unwavering and implicit faith in people's good will and good sense. She believed that human beings possess a natural gravitational instinct toward things that make sense and work well, and that an individual's decisions in most situations will tend toward increasing the collective health and happiness of humanity. This belief, though it was tested every single day, never seemed to fail her, to feel less true. Her optimistic attitude balanced Brian’s obsessive codependency perfectly, smoothed him out, and beneath the mellowness, Ballato was sharp as a razor, with an infallible instinct for the shape of a situation, how to efficiently and calmly dismantle a mess. 

 

One time Brian asked her why she became a cop, expecting to hear a story about a calling like he’d had, or Steineckert’s story about his dad, but she laughed and said, “By accident.” Back when she was in art school a police recruiter came to her first gallery showing and hit on her, telling her she was perfect for law enforcement. She and her friends found this so peerlessly hilarious that she went and took the cop test as a joke, and scored off the charts. “I don’t take this gig too seriously,” she told Brian. “Because it’s just a gig, you know? A gig like any other. You do what you can with it, and you have some fun.”

 

*

 

Samson and Delilah are semi-permanent fixtures at a 24-hour McDonald's on Schechter and Ballato's beat. They'll order fries and a Mcflurry and take turns guarding their spot by the window while the other one works. Samson's pretty young still, wide-eyed and blank-faced, laconic and morose. Delilah is of some indeterminate advanced age, endowed with the magnificent manners of queens of an older generation. She always smells like mothballs and ash and the tropical-fruit-flavored condoms she keeps in her bra. 

 

The manager of Samson and Delilah's McDonald's is named Reginald, and his limited patience for their constant unwanted presence is exhausted at regular intervals, which is why this is not the first time Brian and Ballato have sat at Samson and Delilah's window table, eating french fries and negotiating the peace.

 

Reginald stands next to the table, arms crossed. "Are we gonna deal with this situation now once and for all or am I still paying your salaries for nothing?" he demands of Brian.

 

Ballato smiles at him. "Reggie, would you get us coffee?" she asks.

 

Reginald looks at her phlegmatically. "You gotta order at the counter like everybody else," he says. "This ain't no sit-down-and-order type establishment."

 

"I know," says Ballato. "We're just trying to deal with the situation, as you say. And coffee would help." She smiles at him again, wide, face-crinkling, and Reggie stalks off reluctantly.

 

Brian says to Delilah, who is sitting across from him, "This is a waste of everybody's time, Delilah. Yours, ours, and Reginald's." 

 

"Reginald's got a papertowel dispenser up his butt," says Delilah. "Excuse me, sweetie. Toothpick?"

 

"Thanks," says Brian, taking one. "These are the options, as I see them. You and Samson can find somewhere else to hang your hats, or we can go ahead and bring you in. But we can't keep responding every other day to calls about it. It's a waste of the city's resources."

 

"And it can't be that great for business, huh," adds Ballato. "You guys talking to the heat all the time."

 

"You are correct," sighs Delilah. "On all accounts, I'm afraid." She looks over at Samson, who is eating the M&M’s out of the Mcflurry, eyes downcast. "Honey," she says, rummaging in her purse, "Go to the powder room and do something with your hair, you look a fright."

 

Samson accepts the comb and bottle of mousse and moseys lethargically toward the restrooms. Delilah leans forward, the smell of coconut wafting from her bosom. "The thing is," she says. "Samson's got a little tickle in the throat. It's not good to work outside too much, you know. Here it's warm, and clean. This is a good situation for us, for the time being. We aren't causing any trouble."

 

"Have you guys been testing regularly?" asks Ballato, gently.

 

Delilah wafts the suggestion away with her hand. "Of course," she says. "It's just a winter cold, a little tickle."

 

They drink a cup of coffee, appease Reginald, and get Delilah to concede that she and Samson will vary their home base. Brian gives her one of the printed-out testing schedules from the free clinic they keep in the cruiser. Delilah accepts it graciously, in the manner of someone who is being given a gift that is useless and even somewhat tasteless, but is far too polite to mention it.

 

In the cruiser, Ballato says, "Oh lordy lordy." Her forceful, whooshed-out exhale makes her bangs fly wildly out from her face.

 

"You know if he calls again they're gonna get taken in," says Brian moodily, chewing on Delilah's toothpick

 

"Well, maybe it's not the worst thing," says Ballato, gently. "Maybe Samson will get some care."

 

But Brian doesn't like to think about Delilah anywhere but in her uncomfortable plastic McDonald's chair, eating french fries and reading the Enquirer, Samson slumped beside her. The margin of safety on which every person lives their lives is so thin, so fragile; it amazes Brian.  



	2. Chapter 2

After Brian clocks out for the day he goes to the gym to pick up Bob. Bob’s sitting outside on the smoking bench with Frankie Iero and Ilya, an old ex-fighter guy from the neighborhood who likes to hang out and watch the boxers train. Frankie is eating a box of poptarts, methodically. Bob is smoking and unwrapping his hands, slowly. 

 

Ilya says, “Cruiserweight is some bullshit anyway.” 

 

Frank says, “Mmmhmmm,” around his poptart. Bob grunts. 

 

“I said, when they made that shit up, I said, what is this pansy bullshit? Used to be, you weighed in one ninety, one ninety five, you either gained some weight or you sucked it up and fought the other guy, two hundred, two twenty, whatever. All of a sudden you can’t do that? You gotta have your own division? The too-pansy-for-heavyweight division?” 

 

“Whatever, I don’t make the rules,” says Bob. “What can you do? You can’t do anything.” He looks up, sees Brian, blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth to disguise his smile. “Schechter,” he says, in greeting. 

 

“Bryar,” says Brian, jingling his keys. “Iero. Ilya.” 

 

“Brian!” says Frankie, looking up. “How’s tricks? You coming to my party?” 

 

“Golden,” says Brian. “I dunno, we’ll see.” If Frank is asking him it means Bob hasn’t said yes yet. “Ready, Bryar?” 

 

“Yup,” Bob says around his cigarette, gathering his stuff. Brian wants to step forward, take Bob's gym bag from him so he can finish unwrapping, but he feels Ilya’s sharp, curious old eyes on him, right one sagging from that time in the seventies Nino Benvenuti took off his eyelid with a right cross and the doctors did a piss-poor job sewing it up. Brian waits instead, shifts on the balls of his feet. 

 

"Everybody'll be there," Frankie's saying. "Lindsey already said she'd come, bring her boyfriend."

 

Brian's always startled to hear Ballato called by her first name. There's always a second when he doesn't know who that is, _do I know a Lindsey?_ "We'll see," he says again, inconclusively.

 

Inside the car, Brian says, “Why do you let those old dudes give you shit?” 

 

“What shit?” says Bob, like he’s not paying attention. He finishes unwrapping his hands, takes the Tylenol bottle out of his gym bag pocket, shakes two pills out, swallows them dry. 

 

Brian glances at him, back at the road. “Shit about fighting cruiserweight.” 

 

Bob shrugs. “Ilya’s oldschool.” He rolls his neck out. “And I’m not gonna be fighting cruiser forever. I’m gonna make middleweight by Des Moines in April.” 

 

“Okay,” says Brian. He hates this part of it, the obsessing, the preoccupation with making weight, when twenty or ten or two pounds are all that stands between a fighter and the fight he needs. Frankie’s always trying to weigh up; Bob’s always trying to weigh down. Brian knows it makes a huge difference, what division you fight, and he knows that Bob is one of those unfortunate fighters who fall between the cracks, the fighters they made cruiserweight division for, but any cruiserweight fighter worth a damn is always trying to weigh either up or down out of the category, qualify to get the real fights. Frankie’s always bouncing between light and welter: fights better in welter, but his natural body weight lands him closer to lightweight. 

 

Sometimes, in the weeks before a big fight, it seems like it’s all they can think about, and Brian hates most the few hours before the weigh-in, trying to sweat out or drink up those crucial last few pounds. He thinks about Frankie sitting at Brian’s kitchen table one afternoon, liter bottles of water lined up grimly in front of him, drinking slowly but steadily for hours, Jamia and Bob sitting across from him with their Marlboros and dry encouragement, _chug chug chug Frankie boy, you got it, almost there._ Bob undergoes the opposite ordeal, looking sideways at food and then looking away, going to sweatrooms with Worm. Worm sits outside the door, formidable, reading Us magazine – “Paid my dues, I never have to do that goddamn shit ever again,” Worm will say of these troubles with fond nostalgia, eating a croissant – until Bob emerges shaky and soaked and glowing all over a bright cranberry red. 

 

“Okay what?” asks Bob, sharp. 

 

“Nothing,” says Brian. “I just think you have enough to worry about, with your wrists.” 

 

“If I fight cruiser with these wrists, I’m dead, I’m finished,” says Bob flatly. “I gotta make middle just to stay in it.” 

 

Brian looks at his hands clenching the wheel, skin going pale around his knuckles. He forces them to relax. “You know, I talked to Worm about that,” he says. 

 

There’s silence in the car, and Brian looks over at Bob. He’s scrubbing at his face with his hand, exuding exasperation. 

 

“He told me about the surgery,” continues Brian, steadily, flicking the turn signal. He talked to Worm almost a week ago; he’s been trying to think of a way to bring this up that won’t piss Bob off, but there is no way. 

 

“So,” says Bob, expressionless. 

 

“So, I think you should think about it. More seriously.” Brian’s voice sounds light, wry, in control. 

 

“I’ve thought about it,” says Bob shortly. “Months of recovery, and I might never be strong enough to fight again. There’s no point.” 

 

“The point is, maybe you wouldn’t be in constant pain anymore,” says Brian, measured. 

 

Bob gives him an incredulous look. “How many times do we have to have this conversation?” he demands. 

 

Brian is silent. 

 

“I don’t have that many years left in me,” says Bob. “I’ll get the surgery after I retire. People handle stuff like this. People fight with worse shit for years.” 

 

Brian struggles to think of something to say. Bob lets out his breath, and when he speaks again his voice is softer. “Hey. Remember, you told me, you’d let me decide this stuff? You’d leave it alone?” 

 

Brian did make that promise, but that was before Bob started coming home every day looking like he used to look only after he’d lost a fight, badly. That’s the stonecold bitch of the situation, right there: Bob thinks of his body and the trouble his body gives him as another opponent, that he can out-train, out-plan, out-maneuver, overcome. 

 

Brian clears his throat. “I gotta work on Saturday,” he says. "Velázquez's kid is sick, I gotta come in for him.” 

 

“Okay,” says Bob, palpable relief in his voice that Brian is dropping the subject. 

 

* 

 

When they’re home and Bob’s out of the shower, sitting cross-legged on the floor alternating between coaxing Duke with his pill and rubbing Icy Hot on his wrists, Brian asks about the party as he’s putting Dixie’s harness on. 

 

“I dunno,” says Bob. “Do you wanna go?” He drops the tube of Icy Hot, catches Duke on one of his lethargic circles of the living room. “Hey hey hey you,” he says, his voice sweet and long-suffering. 

 

“I’m not sure,” says Brian. “Do _you_ wanna go?” 

 

Bob shrugs. Water droplets are gathering at the ends of his hair, shining in the late afternoon light from the window. His face looks drawn and tired, familiarly, but his eyes are soft as he holds Duke’s head in his hands, shakes it back and forth. “Are you up for it?” he asks mildly. It seems like he’s talking to the dog, but Brian knows he isn’t. Bob’s in his soft gray drawstring pants that are ridiculously too short for him, shin length, they were probably Brian’s at some point, and a wifebeater. Brian wants to kneel behind him and nuzzle into his warm damp skin, slide his palm under the shirt over Bob’s belly, bite the muscles in his arms. 

 

“I can go to a party,” says Brian. “I’ve got two years. I’ll be fine.” 

 

Bob looks up at him then, his hands still on Duke’s face, and there’s a definite gleam of amusement in his eyes. “I just meant you’re probably tired, Schechter,” he says. 

 

“Oh,” says Brian. “Yeah, that too.” Dixie thumps, impatient. “I’m gonna take Dixie out, you think about it.” 

 

They walk around the block, Dixie all wound-up, tugging on her harness. When they come back inside, Brian sees the Crawford kid getting his mail. He stops. “Hey there,” he says, trying for friendly instead of _paranoid asshole_. 

 

“Oh! Hey, Officer Schechter,” says the kid, slamming his mailbox shut. “What’s up?” 

 

He’s as young and earnest looking as Brian remembers, and Brian thinks to himself, _what, Schechter, you don’t have enough to worry about, you gotta make up stuff to freak out over?_ He clears his throat. “I just wanna say thank you. For looking in on our dog. It’s really nice of you. He’s not doing so great, and it means a lot to Bob.” 

 

“No problem,” says Crawford. “Duke’s a great dog, I hate that he’s so sick.” 

 

“Yeah, me too,” says Brian, and Dixie whines, so they smile at each other and Brian and Dixie take the stairs. 

 

Bob’s in the bedroom watching the Ali-Frazier 1971 Madison Square Garden fight on his computer. Brian takes Dixie’s harness off, kicks off his shoes, sprawls out on the bed next to Bob. 

 

“Ali-Frazier, huh?” he says. 

 

Bob shrugs. “It’s like my mom, she always liked those movies where the heroine dies of cancer.” 

 

They lie there in their bed and watch the fight. Brian can feel Bob’s shoulder pressed against his, twitching almost imperceptibly as he mirrors Ali. “Ahhh, fuck,” he says under his breath when Frazier gets Ali on the ropes with his inhumanly mighty left hook, knocks all the fight out of him. 

 

“How many times you seen this fight?” asks Brian. 

 

“Still tragic,” says Bob, his eyes flicking, following the arc of defeat playing out in front of him. “I’ve got an affinity for tragedy, apparently.” 

 

When the fight’s over, Bob rolls over onto his back. “When I was a kid,” he says thoughtfully, “I wasted so much time daydreaming about fighting in the Garden.” 

 

“Could still happen, dude,” says Brian, shifting his head on his folded arms. He immediately regrets saying it because it makes it sound like he’s humoring Bob, like it isn’t really possible. 

 

“Yeah,” says Bob, quietly, that rawness of resignation in his voice that makes Brian’s heart tighten like a fist in his chest. Bob stares up at the ceiling, unblinking. Brian watches the muscles in his forearms, still tense, still twitching – the automatic, aborted signals Bob’s brain sends to his muscles as it tries out combinations, flicks through them faster than the clicking of a film reel. Brian thinks that right now in Bob’s head, he’s reconstructing the past, seeing Ali get up off the ropes, knock Frazier out, stay the greatest fighter in the universe for a few more years. 

 

Bob lets out his breath, relaxes his arms, turns his head to Brian and smiles. “Wanna go to Frankie’s?” he asks. 

 

“Why the hell not?” says Brian, feeling his heart lighten. 

 

While Brian is in the bathroom brushing his teeth, Bob leans in the doorway, pulling his hoodie over his head, and says, “You know, I was thinking that we need to make up a better story about how we met.” 

 

Brian spits, says, “Oh yeah?” 

 

Bob puts a cigarette between his lips in preparation for leaving the apartment, says around it, “Yeah, you know, like you arrested me or something. Roughed me up, took me downtown.” 

 

“That’s hot,” says Brian, and Bob laughs. 

 

The walk to Frankie’s place isn’t far, twenty minutes. They smoke, and Bob talks more about the Ali-Frazier fight, absentmindedly dissecting it hook by hook. Brian says, “Uh-huh,” and “Ouch, Jesus,” in all the right places. He tries to take his mind off its cop-scan function, looking in each store window, listening to each fragment of conversation, on alert for disruption, discrepancy. 

 

“I’m gonna drink some tonight,” says Bob, when they’re standing outside Frankie’s building, finishing their cigarettes. 

 

After Brian got sober, Bob didn’t drink at all for about six months, and after that he told Brian before he did, every time, casually, and sometimes very precisely, to the beer. It made Brian feel restless and guilty at first, because he thought Bob was asking for his permission, or apologizing, or something, and he didn’t know how to say _it’s really okay, you can do what you want_. It took him a while to figure out Bob isn’t trying to do any of those things. He’s just letting Brian know what’s up. For a while there, Brian made intoxication the unacknowledged third party in their relationship, so it only makes sense that Bob wants to keep him up to speed on how it’s gonna affect the two of them on a given night. 

 

“Okay,” says Brian, dropping the filter of his cigarette. He bumps his shoulder against Bob’s, feels him bump back. 

 

* 

 

Ballato and her boyfriend are already at the party, and Brian goes automatically to lean on the wall beside her, letting Bob go to the kitchen to get a beer. 

 

“Missed me, huh?” says Ballato, and her boyfriend leans around her to smile at Brian, wide and toothy. 

 

“Hey, Gerard,” says Brian. “I did indeed, Ballato.” 

 

There’s a silence that would be slightly awkward were it not for the soundtrack of the Bouncing Souls. Brian never knows what to say around Ballato’s boyfriend, how to act. He’s some kind of artist, sweet, weird; Brian likes him a lot, but there’s no place for him in the unit that is Schechter-and-Ballato, kickass wiseass badass crimefighting team, the little world they’ve made for themselves inside the cruiser, no one to rely on but each other. Brian wonders if Ballato doesn’t tell Gerard the same things Brian doesn’t tell Bob. 

 

Brian ran into Gerard one time at a meeting, in a Presbyterian Church. He had only met Gerard once or twice before, in real life, and it took Brian a minute to recognize him, sitting across from Brian in the circle of chairs, sunglasses on, hair messed up, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand. When the donation basket came around to him, Gerard jumped a little bit, like he was startled, put both cups of coffee carefully down, pulled a crumpled dollar bill from his jacket pocket to drop in the basket, shoved his sunglasses on top of his head. "Hi, I'm Gerard, I'm an addict," he said, too loudly. He passed the basket on with one hand and held the other hand up in greeting, fingers splayed, grinning. 

 

Brian said, "Hi, Gerard," along with everybody else, but he looked away, embarrassed, and didn't look back at Gerard for the rest of the meeting. He felt uncomfortable, like he was being accidentally exposed to a part of Ballato's life she'd wanted to keep private from him. He remembered the looks she'd given Brian sometimes when he was at his worst: fast, discerning looks that scalded Brian with the compassion they concealed, made him sweat, like he'd been found out. After the meeting, Brian and Gerard shared a sheepish cigarette under the awning of the church's meeting room door, but Brian never mentioned the encounter to Ballato, and he never went to a meeting at that church again.

 

Now, at the party, Gerard is again wearing sunglasses and speaking too loudly, smiling too broadly. Gerard and Ballato have the same smile, something Brian wants to look away from, because he's not ready for it, that solar flare of unconcealed emotion. Ballato is telling Gerard a story, something Brian missed the beginning of, and she's walking her fingers up his arm in illustration of something. He peers at her fingers in amazement, and then makes to swat them away. She grabs his hand, holds it tight so he can't move it. Gerard says, "Ow, ow," voice cracking with amusement. 

 

Brian thinks about walking gracefully away, finding someone else to do his party barnacle-cling with, but Ballato turns her grin toward him, lets go of Gerard's hand.

 

“Let’s stroll,” she says to Brian. “Hold my beer, sugar,” to Gerard. 

 

“K,” says Gerard. He takes the bottle and there’s an awkward second when Brian and Gerard’s eyes skate off each other, almost meet. Ballato takes Brian by the elbow, steers. 

 

“Bob with you?” asks Ballato. 

 

“Yeah,” says Brian. “Kitchen.” He’s hung up on Ballato handing her beer to Gerard, casually, like it was nothing, no problem. 

 

"Let's go say hey," says Ballato. "Don't you think that's the gentlemanly thing to do?"

 

"Sure," says Brian. 

 

They bump into Bob coming out of the kitchen, holding a beer and laughing at something Cortez, voice rising in indignation, is saying behind him. Bob widens his eyes at Ballato, says, "Heeeeeeeeey."

 

"Heeeeeeeeey," says Ballato back, faking an uppercut to Bob's chin, and Bob pretends to stagger, comes back with a slow pretend roundhouse to the side of her head. They feint and jab for a minute in the doorway. This is how they always greet each other. It makes Brian feel awkward and indulgent, like a smiling dad watching his kids scuffle, wondering how anybody could ever feel that young.

 

Brian and Ballato go over by the fire escape window, where some kids are smoking up. They look at Ballato and Schechter sideways and kind of scuttle off, sheepish, grinning. 

 

“Our reputation precedes us,” remarks Ballato, plucking the abandoned joint from the Virgin Mary ashtray and taking a prim, exaggeratedly ladylike hit. 

 

They sit by the window for a while and talk about nothing, shittalk shitty cops whose messes they have to clean up every day, the bigheads and the psychos and the racists and the lazy asses. After a while Ballato catches a glimpse of Gerard, restless across the room, taking on and off his sunglasses. 

 

“Gotta go, the wife’s getting stircrazy,” says Ballato. 

 

“Sure thing,” says Brian. 

 

In the kitchen, Worm is sitting enthroned on two fold-out chairs pushed together, eating Twizzlers and talking about the Mothman. Frankie and Jamia are standing in front of the stove, arguing about the popcorn they’re trying to make, Jamia's hand splayed out on Frank's laughing face, trying to shove him away. Bob and Mattie Cortez are sitting on the kitchen table, crosslegged, facing each other, playing the fighter game where they race to see who can wrap their hands faster. Brian leans in behind Bob, bumps his shoulder against Bob’s back, says, “How’s it going, guys.” 

 

“Brian!” says Cortez. “Time us, buddy.” 

 

“Okay,” says Brian, pulling up a chair. He nods at Worm. Worm nods back. Brian waits for the second hand on his watch to come around, says, “Okay, go,” right when Bob is taking a swallow from his beer. 

 

“Shit,” says Bob, letting out a huff of laughter, puts the bottle down. Brian watches their hands. Ten yards of gauze, ten yards of tape. Cortez’s faster, but he messes up, has to undo and redo. Bob’s hands are steady, dexterous, over under over under, first the right hand then the left. 

 

“Done,” says Cortez. 

 

“Motherfucker,” says Bob mildly. 

 

“One minute twelve seconds,” says Brian. 

 

Bob leans over, takes Cortez’s hands, looks at them. “That’s a shitty wrap,” he says. 

 

“Oh, whatever, dude,” says Cortez, grinning. “You’re a bitter bastard. I hear your mom's a shitty wrap.” 

 

Over at the stove, Frank has Jamia by the wrist and he's flopping her limp, non-resistant hand against her face. "Why're you hitting yourself, huh, huh, Jamia, why're you hitting yourself," he says, like a bratty little kid picking on his sister, while she says, "Frank. Frank. Frank," trying to be stern and not laugh.

 

*

 

Halfway through the walk home, in the cold, Brian says, “I talked to Worm.” It was while Bob and Jamia were playing the wrap game, rowdy-tipsy-loud in the hall outside the bathroom, while Frank stuffed popcorn down the back of Jamia's shirt. Brian stayed in the kitchen with Worm, and Cortez made hot chocolate. Brian doesn't have any words for how the sound of an apartment full of happy drunks makes him feel. It's nothing he can't handle, but nothing he can ignore either, an ache, the feeling of something necessary just within reach. 

 

“Uh-huh,” says Bob, too buzzed to sound pissed off.  It's nothing Bob would ever talk about, but Brian knows he gets antsy when Brian and Worm talk and Bob's not there, not involved in the conversation. Brian's not sure what that's about, a control thing. “What about.” 

 

“Back home,” says Brian. 

 

Bob grins down at the sidewalk. “Oh, yeah?” 

 

Brian told Bob early on, when he asked why Brian left Detroit: there are some places that you don't leave, you get out of. Worm has a similar story about Detroit, and what the fight game was like there. Brian likes to hear it, when Worm's in the mood to tell it. 

 

That night, Worm told it like this: Wherever you go where people play the fight game, there's a culture around it that belongs only to that place and to those fighters. And like any culture, the culture of the fight game can have sicknesses. There was a bad cancer in the fight game in Detroit, a lot of fixed matches, money where it shouldn't be, promoters paid off to stage wildly unfair fights to boost one fighter's record. A lot of trainers who didn't give a shit about their fighters and brought them up bad, teaching them the brutality without the geometry, like all there was to it was could you take a punch and could you hit back harder. A lot of fighters never made it past their tenth pro fight, fought hard and won big but ended up big bulky vegetables, their mamas coming by the nursing home every Sunday to read to them from the Gospel. Or they ended up worse. All of that wasted strength. 

 

Worm came up like that too, and he had to learn better. He's not sure how he did, he told Brian (the smell of steaming milk on the stove, Cortez looking over and giving the two of them his sweet wide loopy smile at the sound of the familiar story.) But one day, long after Worm was out of the fight game himself and was training young up-and-comers, he looked at one of his own in the ring and thought suddenly that if something happened to him that Worm could have prevented – by training him better, more thoroughly, by not putting him in set-up fights, trading wins for losses with other trainers, by treating each fighter as an end in themselves and not a means to an end – then Worm would be responsible for a thing he could not bear, the murder of something he loved. He felt sick. 

 

He put it together gradually after that, talking to sound fighters and straight trainers. He didn't want for his kids the kind of fast money and cheap fame and wasted talent and bitterness that had been the fruits of his career; he wanted for them the real thing, what only the best fighters attain: a brief but real and honorable immortality painstakingly manufactured from the most mortal of substances: sweat, blood, rivalry, ambition. Worm decided he needed to leave the city. He got some venture capital together via old friends in the repo business, bought a warehouse in Chicago sight unseen, gathered his best fighters, and flew out of Detroit one night. 

 

"I remember seeing the lights of Chicago that night, before we landed," said Worm thoughtfully, leaning back in his chair. There was the creak of the linoleum, Cortez standing at the stove humming under his breath. Brian sat in his chair in front of Worm, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, attentive. "It was a beautiful sight, all those lights down there, too many to see the end of them. I felt clean inside for the first time in a long time. I thought to myself, I'm never again going to put a fighter of mine in a ring for a fight I know he has no chance of winning. It was a real clean feeling." 

 

*

 

Back at the apartment, Bob opens the refrigerator, pokes around aimlessly. Brian knows he’s delaying checking on Duke, so Brian goes and does it instead, comes back into the kitchen, stands behind Bob, presses his face into Bob’s back between his shoulderblades. “He’s asleep,” he whispers. 

 

Bob grunts, a warm wordless sound of acknowledgment, relief. 

 

Brian presses his hands against Bob’s hips, rubs his face hard against the fabric of Bob’s Rise Against hoodie. The kitchen is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. Brian can feel Bob breathing. He turns his head and whispers, “What’s wrong with how we met?” 

 

Bob lets out a sleepy, amused bark of laughter. “Other than how it took me six million billion years to get you to jump my bones?” 

 

Brian smiles against Bob’s back, _six million billion_ , sometimes when Bob’s drunk he sounds like a little kid. “You pretended you didn’t know who I was for the longest time.” 

 

“Who says I was pretending?” says Bob grumpily. “Frankie knows a lot of short little dudes with chips on their shoulders.” 

 

Brian laughs. 

 

“Naw, I knew who you were,” admits Bob. “But you can be pretty intimidating. I had no idea you were into me.” 

 

“Hmm,” says Brian, remembering sitting next to Bob on Frankie’s couch one night while Bob played Halo, cigarette hanging from his mouth, and Brian drank. They sat there like that for the whole night and Bob never looked at him, never spoke to him once. His range of communication was limited to growling at the game or shouting at Frankie and Jamia and Cortez in the next room. At the end of the night, Brian got up and went home. He doesn’t know what clearer signal he could have sent; you sit and watch a dude play a video game for two hours, what could this mean but _I want to suck your dick_. 

 

“I was into you though,” says Bob. “I was always into you.” 

 

“Even when you ignored me and played Halo all night?” 

 

Bob laughs, sheepish. “Especially when I ignored you and played Halo all night.” 

 

When he thinks back on it though, Brian always kind of knew there was something there, the potential of something. Even just hanging out in a room with a bunch of other dudes, there was that slightly unsettled feeling when Bob met his eyes that you really only feel with people with whom there is at least the possibility of mutual attraction. Brian kept his crush under control until they got to the stage where they were at least nodding at each other, saying _hey, how you doing_. It was at that point that he went with Frank to one of Bob’s home fights, and then it was all over. There was no going back. 

 

Brian whispers, “I jerked off over you,” into Bob’s back. He feels Bob’s breath hitch, steady out again, and he smiles. 

 

“Oh yeah?” says Bob. “Perv.” 

 

“I wanted you so bad,” mumbles Brian, “And you were so fucking _nice_ to me.” He remembers that niceness, that distance, how Bob would ask Brian about his work, about being a cop, and he’d listen politely and then turn to someone else in the room, scold them, smile at them. How sharp the difference was, between the way Bob talked to him and the way Bob talked to people he really knew. It made Brian feel unequivocally on the outside of something, like Bob was keeping him firmly and intentionally on the outside of his life. He remembers going home to his apartment, lying in his bed, sticking his hands in his boxers and thinking about the distant cautious look in Bob’s eyes, that guardedness, that reserve. And the sweat on his shoulders when he swung around with a roundhouse punch, knocked the other guy down and out; the single-minded focus that was locked up somewhere behind that reserve. 

 

“You were so awkward,” says Bob, softly, fondly, “But I couldn’t tell you were being awkward cause I didn’t know you. I thought you were just being a hardass.” 

 

One night Brian had too much to drink and got Bob to talk to him about boxing, sitting on Cortez's fire escape smoking weed. Bob’s explanations of the fight world and why he loved it were careful, precise, thoughtful. It sounded completely foreign to Brian, as distant and inexplicable and archaic and arbitrary as, say, professional ballet. Brian liked how Bob explained things, how he spoke slowly, wouldn’t be rushed or interrupted. But when he finished, Brian shook his head and said, “I don’t know, man. It just seems like a romanticization of violence to me. I see kids fighting for real every day on the streets and there’s nothing remotely redeeming in it, it’s just a survival instinct. Like eating, or fucking.” 

 

Bob kind of shrugged, laughed, but he stopped talking, decisively, like he had decided Brian wasn’t worth wasting his words on. The next day Brian woke up both hungover and in a state of acute humiliation, remembering how he’d blown his first real chance to talk to Bob. When he got in the cruiser he said to Ballato, “Quick, tell me something you’ve done that was embarrassing beyond the point of redemption.” 

 

“I always win this game,” Ballato had said, slurping her milkshake. “I was in a rockabilly gynocore band in art school. Try and top that.” 

 

Brian said, "You're a cop who went to art school. I think you win right there."

 

Ballato made a loud honking noise with her straw and said, "Did I hear somebody stutter? Whoops! I forgot to care." 

 

* 

 

Saturday morning around eight Bob calls and leaves a message on Brian’s cell telling him Duke’s died. His voice sounds raw and blank, like he doesn’t get it yet. Bob used to call Duke _my sweet guy_. He stopped when Duke got sick, like he was afraid of that love, like he was trying to cure himself of it. Brian listens to the message, the way Bob pauses between words, and feels dread instead of grief. Dread of coming home and seeing the bareness of the loss in Bob’s eyes. 

 

Brian’s seen a lot of grief and loss in his adult life, wild senseless unimaginable loss. Parents losing their children, or parents killing their children, or children killing other children, and awakening from it afterward like from a dream, bewildered and terrified. The worst night Brian’s ever had he sat on the curb next to a fourteen-year-old kid who’d just shot his thirteen-year-old cousin. The kid didn’t even try to leave before they got there, and while he was questioned he seemed alternately not to understand that his cousin was really dead, or what death even was, and to be overwhelmed by the knowledge of what he had done. His eyes would widen and his whole face would open up with a kind of wild, existential terror, an abyss. Brian sat next to him and thought that unless there was some way he could look at this child and say _you can take it back_ , he could no longer believe in god, or in any other good, ordering force to the universe. 

 

Tragedies like that appear in his life on a wave of radio static and disappear from it that same day after he files the report, and it makes no sense for Brian to dwell over them or grieve for the people caught up in them. The next day there’s something else to worry about, something horrific, or mundane, and it’s like that lightning strike of tragedy – the kid on the curb with his wide open face _I did this_ – never happened. So early on Brian learned to turn off that grief instinct, like most cops do, and if Brian’s honest that was a big part of what the drinking and the pills were about. He can’t feel grief for Duke’s death, the loss of him in the world, though it had genuinely pained him to see Duke suffer, and it came close to being unbearable sometimes, seeing the way Bob took it so much to heart. Brian's looked at a lot of loss in his life, and it takes more than the death of a sweet old dog to knock down the fortress he’s built to withstand it. 

 

He’s out with Velázquez's partner Davis today, not Ballato, but he thinks even if Ballato was sitting next to him when he listened to the message he probably wouldn’t have told her. He calls Bob back when they’re on a midmorning coffee stop, goes to stand outside on the sidewalk while Davis looks at croissants. 

 

“Hey,” Bob answers, not his customary _Schechter_. 

 

“How are you holding up?” asks Brian. 

 

“Pretty good,” says Bob. Brian wants to ask if he’s still at the apartment or if he went in to Worm's today after all, but then Bob clears his throat and says, “Dixie’s confused. I locked her up in the bathroom when the guys came so she wouldn’t see them taking him away, but maybe that was a bad idea. Cause she just seems confused now, like she’s looking for him.” 

 

“Yeah,” says Brian gently. 

 

There’s a pause. “I called Worm,” says Bob finally. “I’ll go in, in a little bit, get some time in.” 

 

“You don’t have to,” says Brian, softly, emphatically. 

 

“Yeah, I know,” says Bob. “I wanna. I need to.” 

 

Brian’s brain is still on cop-scan, watching to see that the little hunched old lady with the shopping cart makes it across the street on time. He shifts his belt. He wants to be holding Bob right now, on their bed, wrapped around him, so Bob can feel his heartbeat. 

 

Davis comes out, hands Brian his coffee, and Brian smiles. “I’ll call you again,” he says to Bob. 

 

“Okay,” says Bob. 

 

“Are you good?” 

 

Bob laughs a little. “I’m good, Schechter.” 

 

“I love you,” says Brian, and he tries to keep the fervency out of his voice, the hysterical force of it, keep it casual and normal. 

 

“You too,” says Bob.

 

When Brian’s day is over, after he’s changed and when he’s sitting in his car but before he goes home, he calls Travis. 

 

“Been a while, B,” says Travis, and the sound of his voice is so steadying and reassuring and real, Brian slumps forward and presses his forehead against the steering wheel, closes his eyes. 

 

“I’m in the parking lot at work,” he says. “I’m thinking about all the liquor stores on the way home.” 

 

“Yeah, you are,” says Travis. He sounds affectionate, amused. Early on, Travis told Brian, over shitty coffee in a shitty diner at two in the morning, _Don’t bother fronting with me, your responsible got-it-under-control cop face, cause I know every sick stupid thought you think. I’ve thought them all before, and I’ve done them all before._

 

“Bob’s dog died today,” says Brian. He rubs his forehead against the steering wheel; he wants to gnaw on it like a caged animal. He can hear the jingle of the bell on the liquor store door, feel it under his skin. 

 

“Life is shit,” says Travis. “Get to know this.” 

 

Brian laughs. “I need to talk to you more,” he says, taking advantage of the way the laughter opened up the tightness in his chest a little. “I can’t do this on my own.” 

 

“Damn fucking straight you can’t,” says Travis. “But you have to keep learning that over and over again, don’t you?” 

 

“Yeah,” says Brian. “I don’t wanna go home and look at him. He really fucking loved that dog.” 

 

“And you really fucking love him,” says Travis. “And that’s really fucking scary. Deal with it.” 

 

“Okay,” says Brian. He straightens his spine. “Okay.” 

 

“Go home to your guy,” says Travis. “Find a meeting tomorrow. Take two and call me on Monday.” 

 

Brian laughs again. He hangs up, drives home.  



	3. Chapter 3

One night three years ago in the kitchen of Cortez’s apartment, Brian leaned against the counter drinking a beer while Bob sat at the table, cleaning a cut on his forehead. When Brian came into the room, Bob had looked up, smiled, said, “What’s up, Schechter.” 

 

“Nothing much, how’s it going, dude,” Brian had replied automatically, continuing on his path to get a beer from the fridge, but he was startled by the sight of Bob, in boxers and a black t-shirt and wristbands, straddling a kitchen chair backwards and leaning over the shiny reflective surface of a pot lid on the table, sliding a swab into a gash above his eyebrow. 

 

Brian leaned, drank his beer, watched Bob swab out the blood, dip another swab in a bottle of rubbing alcohol, clean the cut out. His hands were perfectly steady. It was only when he threaded a needle with thin, almost translucent white thread and held it in the flame of his lighter that Brian cleared his throat and said, “Dude. Don’t you think you should let someone else do that.” 

 

Bob laughed, turning the tip of the needle in the flame. He hadn’t looked at Brian since he smiled when Brian walked in. “Someone like who?” he asked, leaning over the pot lid, pinching the separated skin together with one hand and sliding the needle quickly and deftly through with the other. 

 

Brian stalled, teeth clacking on the bottle neck of his beer, and then said, “I don’t know. A medical professional, maybe.” 

 

Bob didn’t speak until he was done stitching, less than a minute, maybe thirty seconds, then he snipped the thread and said, “I used to do this for a job. I was a cut man for five, six years.” 

 

“Yeah?” said Brian. He had not known this about Bob. He’d been friends with Frank and Jamia long enough – his oldest friends in Chicago besides Ballato – and been to enough fights with them that he knew what a cut man is, the guy ringside who stops the bleeding in between rounds, relocates dislocated noses and shoulders, does whatever it takes to keep a fighter who wants to stay in looking decent enough for the ref. He tried to imagine Bob doing this, ducking under the ropes, packing cuts with gauze, letting the fighters spit their bloody teeth out onto his palm. “Pretty useful skill,” he settled on, as a neutral comment. 

 

Bob was done, standing up, gathering his supplies laid out neatly on the table: swabs, rubbing alcohol, lighter, needle, surgical thread. He flashed Brian a grin, put a cigarette in his mouth. “You think?” he said, around it. “Lemme know, if you ever need to look like you aren’t down for the count. I’ll fix you up.” 

 

He left the kitchen, left Brian leaning against the counter with his bottle of beer, lustful, wordless, and bemused. 

 

The next time they saw each other was a Saturday. Brian was hanging out alone in his apartment with his tequila hangover, par for the course, when Jamia called and said she was running late getting back from working her cousin's fight in Evanston, could Brian please please go to Worm’s and pick Frankie and Bob up. Brian had his palm over his aching eyes, was preparing to beg off, when Jamia said Bob’s name. 

 

He filled the bathroom sink with cold water, stuck his whole head in it, and then drove to the gym. Bob said, “Backseat’s for midgets,” to Frank and got in next to Brian. Brian thought about how he probably looked like hell, face swollen and scruffy, eyes red, baseball cap pulled low, and smelled like it too, that lingering, saturated drunk-smell coming up off his pores that you couldn’t ever shower away completely. But Bob grinned at him, one of his oddly demure grins, a twist of his mouth, crinkle of his eyes, chin tucked, and Brian’s heart thump-thumped in his chest, a sudden loss of equilibrium that would come to be familiar. 

 

Brian thought Bob looked different somehow, but he wasn’t sure how, until Bob flipped open the visor mirror and started deftly putting his piercings back in – lip, ears. Brian watched him out of the corner of his eye, listened to him talk to Frankie in the backseat about some guy named Arnold from Savannah who talked a lot of shit and had a weak right side to back it up. 

 

After Brian dropped Frankie off, Bob told him how to get to his place. When Brian parked they sat in silence in the car for a minute, not looking at each other, and for some reason it felt peaceful rather than awkward. Brian dug his thumbnail into the vinyl of the steering wheel and said, “I’ll see you around?” It came out like a question, though he didn’t mean it to. 

 

“I’m going to Philly next week for a fight,” said Bob. His voice sounded warm, friendlier than usual. “But yeah, I’ll be around, Schechter.” 

 

“Good luck with that,” said Brian. “With Philly.” 

 

Bob laughed. “Thanks,” he said. “I need it.” 

 

Weekend after next was Halloween, and at Frankie’s birthday party, Brian waded across the crowded room, already a little buzzed, to where Bob was leaning against the wall, hood up, smoking. 

 

“Hey,” said Brian. 

 

“Hey, Schechter,” said Bob, turning his head and exhaling. 

 

“How was Philly?” asked Brian, after a pause. 

 

Bob shrugged, ashed into an abandoned birthday cake plate. “It happened,” he said. “It’s over. I lived to tell the tale. How are the mean streets of Chicago?” 

 

“Mean,” said Brian. 

 

Sometime later in the night, they passed each other in the narrow hall between the bathroom and the living room that doubled as a laundry room, and Brian backed Bob up against the dryer and kissed him. Bob was warm, and relaxed, and yielding. Brian sucked Bob’s lower lip into his mouth, put his palm on Bob’s throat to feel his heartbeat. When they pulled apart, Bob laughed, quietly. 

 

Brian looked down at his hands, braced on the edge of the dryer on either side of Bob’s waist. He moved them, put them on Bob’s bare arms where his hoodie sleeves were pushed up, tucked his fingers into the soft skin on the inside of Bob’s elbows. 

 

“Want another beer?” he asked, voice low, because they were so close together. 

 

“Naw,” said Bob. “I want more orange cake, though.” 

 

“I’ll get you some,” said Brian, and went to the kitchen. 

 

Brian sat in the corner of the couch the rest of the night, drinking, while Bob sat on the floor a little way away with Frankie and Jamia. Every now and then their eyes would catch, snag, and Bob would smile a little, duck further under his hood, but Brian wouldn’t smile back. Instead he’d look down at his own hand, resting on his knee, curled lightly around his cigarette. 

 

When Brian got ready to leave, hugged Frankie goodbye, Bob said, “Hey, I’ll walk down with you.” Brian nodded, not meeting his eyes. Bob’s voice sounded easy-going, amused. Brian felt wound up tighter than a guitar string about to snap, coiled. Down on the street next to Brian’s car, Misfits leaking out of Frankie’s third-floor windows, Bob put his hands in his hoodie pockets, smiled and shrugged at Brian, as if to say _what are you gonna do?_

 

Brian jingled his keys in his hand. His mouth felt dry, and his heart was beating too fast in his chest. 

 

“Are you good to drive?” asked Bob. 

 

Brian tried to remember how many beers he’d had. He couldn’t. “Yeah,” he said. 

 

“Sure?” said Bob, intent. 

 

Brian stepped forward, reached out and brushed his thumb over Bob’s lipring. Bob let out a breath and Brian felt it on his fingers, and then Bob was up against him, crowding him into the side of his car. Brian pushed his chin up and Bob grabbed it, kissed him. The door handle dug into Brian’s back and he shifted, pushed up against Bob, fumbled back behind him to open the car door, and dragged Bob into the backseat by his hoodie. Bob was laughing again and Brian crawled into his lap, kissed him hard to shut him up. 

 

“I’ve been waiting on you for a while, you know,” said Bob, sometime in the next few minutes, and Brian shoved him back against the window, braced his arms on either side of him, said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck you, you’re so hot,” and stuck his tongue back down Bob’s throat. 

 

*

 

Brian figured out pretty quickly that Bob talks a lot about the fight world in general, but not much about his own life in it. The first few months they saw each other, Bob left periodically for a few days at a time, and Brian knew he was going with Worm to fights in other cities, but when he came back and Brian asked him about it, he would always kind of shrug and smile and say either that it went okay or that it was over. Brian figured _okay_ meant he’d won and _over_ meant he’d lost, but he didn’t want to pry. That whole part of Bob's life felt private, hallowed, naturally distinct from the part of his life that was hanging out in Brian's apartment drinking beer and watching chick flicks.

 

So Brian still remembers when they were sitting in a deli eating lunch and a kid came up to Bob and said, nervously, but playing it casual, “Hey. Are you BC Bryar?” 

 

Brian paused, sandwich halfway to his mouth, but Bob said calmly, “Yeah. What’s your name?” 

 

“Chris,” said the kid, flushing and jittering with excitement. “Man – I saw your fight last year, in Jacksonville? Against Jermain Taylor? Man, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

 

“Thanks,” said Bob. “Taylor’s some serious stuff.” 

 

The kid asked Bob to sign a napkin, and Bob did. Brian had met Bob for lunch in the middle of his beat, so he was in uniform, and the kid kept casting him tiny, curious, trepidatious looks. Bob smiled down at the napkin he was signing and said, “This is my buddy Schechter. I’m not in trouble.” 

 

“Oh,” said the kid, embarrassed. “Cool.” 

 

When the kid thanked him again before he walked away, Bob said, softly, emphatically, “Thank _you_.” Then he went back to his sandwich, ignoring Brian’s _please explain this to me_ stare, but he was slightly flushed, especially around the ears, a tell Brian was starting to learn could mean that Bob was either angry, embarrassed, aroused, or flattered. Brian decided on flattery as the most likely cause in this situation and said slyly, after a pause, “BC Bryar, huh?” 

 

Bob shrugged. “It’s my fight name. Bob just doesn't sound like a dude who's gonna knock your lights out.” 

 

“Cute,” said Brian, dryly. “That kid totally wanted to blow you, by the way.” 

 

“Oh yeah?” said Bob, grinning, picking at his sandwich. “Too bad I’ve already got somebody to do that, then.” 

 

* 

 

Not long after Bob and Brian moved in together, almost a year after Frankie’s Halloween birthday party, Brian began waking up on Monday mornings still drunk. After that, a couple of shots, standing in his socks in the freezer light, became a part of his early morning routine, what it took to get him to the station on time and in his cruiser in a relatively functional state. It wasn’t a big deal. It took more than a couple shots to get Brian drunk. But pretty soon, it stopped being enough to get him through until he got off beat and home and could open his first beer of the night, so he started figuring out ways to drink during the day, starting with the venerable liquor-in-the-coffee-cup ploy. 

 

What amazes Brian when he looks back on this part of his life is how at the time he felt absolutely no guilt or shame. He sat next to Ballato drinking his vaguely coffee-flavored vodka, popping breath mints like a junkie pops Oxys, and thought nothing of it. He needed to be drunk like he needed to breathe, and so he felt no more guilt about the booze than about breathing. He labored under the alcoholic's inveterate illusion that booze did not affect his judgment or behavior, and so he felt no responsibility toward Ballato, who relied on his good judgment every day as he relied on hers: completely, like soldiers in a war. Besides, as long she didn’t know about it, it could not really be said to be happening. 

 

Bob never said anything directly, about the recycling bin crowded with beer bottles, or the vodka in the freezer, or the bottles of benzos Brian kept in his sock drawer and his left pants pocket and the glove compartment of his car, or the miserable, miserable weekend mornings. He picked Brian up when Brian called from the bar, so drunk that even he knew he couldn't drive, so drunk that he couldn't remember which number on speeddial was Bob's and called his mom's answering machine in Detroit by mistake more than once. Lots of nights, Brian was too wasted to fuck Bob when Bob asked him to, too wasted even to get off, and Bob never said anything about that either.

 

Bob still worked as a cut guy occasionally, usually at Worm's fighters' home fights, if Cortez was busy or not around. When they were moving in together, Bob showed Brian a plastic vial before he put it in the refrigerator. "This is adrenaline chloride," he said. "It's a vasoconstrictor, it stops blood. I gotta keep it in the fridge." He paused, not looking at Brian when he spoke, the way he did when he was weighing his words very precisely. "You can't get high off it," he said finally.

 

Brian felt a flash of anger rush down his spine and through his arms, making his muscles tighten, but he had no idea whether he was angry at Bob or at himself. He nodded tightly, left the room.

 

Brian’s sober day was a Tuesday. They went on a call to a 7-Eleven, a dude on speed who’d been there for hours, making the clerk nervous. Brian remembers skating through the call on autopilot, not really engaged, not really paying attention, letting Ballato talk to the guy as he got more and more agitated, and then he remembers the guy on the floor, Ballato kicking the switchblade away and shouting, “Hands on the floor, hands where I can see them!” and then, “Schechter? _Officer_ _Schechter_!” 

 

He snapped out of it, helped her cuff the guy, but he didn’t get what was really happening until the tweaker was in the backseat and they were driving back to the station, and he looked over at Ballato and said dumbly, “You’re bleeding.” 

 

There was a long, shallow scratch on her hand, and Brian honestly could not remember the guy being that close to her. Ballato said, “Do me a favor and don’t speak,” and her voice was taut, colder than Brian could ever remember hearing it. 

 

That night, when they got off beat, Brian sat in Ballato’s car and looked at her hands clenching the steering wheel, right one bandaged up. She seemed calm, but all he had to do was look at the column of her spine, the angle of her neck, and he knew she was angry beyond the possibility of deflecting or defusing. “I’m putting in to be reassigned,” she said. 

 

Brian looked at his feet, at his hands in his lap. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. He didn’t know how to be a cop without her next to him. 

 

Ballato took a deep breath. “You’ve screwed up, and you’ve screwed up, and you’ve screwed up,” she said, steadily, looking straight ahead. “And I’ve put up and covered up and done everything I could because I know what you can be, Schechter, I _know_ how good you can be, and I trusted you to resolve this – situation,” a helpless wave of her hand encompassing Brian's entire being. “But it just doesn’t look like you’re gonna, huh, Schechter?” 

 

Brian was silent some more. 

 

“I value you,” said Ballato. “I value you as a cop, and I value you as a human being. I even used to admire you. I value our partnership. But I don’t value it enough to die for it.” 

 

Brian got out of her car, and got in his own, and drove to a bar, and drank, and drank, and drank. Bob found him, at some point, and Brian remembers the steadiness of his hand on the small of Brian’s back, his voice saying calmly, “I’m gonna take you home now, okay?” 

 

“Okay,” said Brian. 

 

He sat on the edge of their bed and Bob sat crosslegged on the floor in front of him, untying Brian’s shoes, tugging them off. When he was done he didn’t move, just sat there looking down at his hands wrapped around Brian’s ankles, his thumbs brushing gently, reassuringly back and forth. Brian looked down too, his mind a blank. 

 

“I love you,” said Bob finally, clearing his throat. “You should know.” 

 

This was the first time Brian could remember Bob ever saying that to him, and he felt something in his throat, bitter, like revulsion, that he had to hear it like this. 

 

“And I’ll put up with a lot of shit,” said Bob. “A lot of shit, for a long time. But I won’t put up with it forever.” His hands squeezed Brian’s ankles one more time, reassuringly, and he stood. 

 

The next day, Brian went to the station and took the vacation time he was owed, and he looked up a meeting in the phonebook, and he met Travis, the elementary school art teacher with the wild hair and the studious glasses and three years sober, who became Brian’s map out of the burning building. And he didn’t lose Bob, and he got Ballato back, and these are miracles he still has trouble believing in, but is grateful for every single day. 

 

* 

 

Brian comes home the day Duke died and finds Bob on the couch with Dixie, curled up in the dim afternoon light. Brian leans over the couch behind him, nuzzles into his neck, the soft scruff of his beard. 

 

“I’m doing okay,” says Bob, before Brian can ask. 

 

Brian kisses the side of his neck, gently, methodically, from his earlobe to his collarbone, and Bob tilts his head, lets him, breathes out quietly. “Let’s eat ice cream and watch _Girlfight_ ,” Brian whispers into Bob’s skin. 

 

“Okay,” says Bob. 

 

He looks into the half pint of Ben and Jerry’s and says, “Middleweight by April,” shrugs, eats a spoonful of Mint Chocolate Chip. After _Girlfight_ they watch _Bring It On_. Bob’s got his feet in Brian’s lap, and Brian brings his hand stealthily down to cradle the arch. Bob shakes him off half-heartedly, says, “Don’t, asshole, I hate it.” Whenever Dixie jumps off the couch to run around, Bob’s eyes leave the movie and follow her, restlessly, until she comes back. 

 

“I know you don’t wanna hear this right now,” says Brian when the movie’s over. “But Duke had a year with us, a really fucking good year, that he wouldn’t have had otherwise.” 

 

“I know,” says Bob quietly. Brian crawls down the couch, pushes his face against Bob’s belly. Bob puts his hand on the back of Brian’s neck, and they stay like that for a minute. Brian thinks about how he sometimes felt a little bit jealous of Duke, knew it was ridiculous, but couldn’t help it, because Bob loved him so transparently, so completely, and Brian’s greedy. He apologizes to Duke in his mind for being an asshole. 

 

“Hey,” says Bob, threading his fingers through Brian’s hair. “I know neediness gets you all hot and stuff, wanna go to bed?” 

 

“If you do,” says Brian, muffled against Bob’s shirt. 

 

“I do,” says Bob, quietly. 

 

“I hate you, by the way,” remarks Brian. “How did you know that about me?” 

 

Bob snorts. 

 

When Brian is brushing his teeth in his boxers in the bathroom, Bob passes by, shuffling in his ridiculous slippers, and Brian turns away from the sink to grab Bob around the waist, walk into his back. 

 

“Hey!” says Bob, grumpy. 

 

The faded Chick Corea shirt he wears to bed is soft against Brian’s forehead, and Brian rubs against it, but can’t talk because his toothbrush is still in his mouth. Bob got the shirt when he was fourteen and went to see Corea play, a starry-eyed jazz kid. Brian likes to think about it. 

 

Bob waits patiently for a few breaths, letting Brian push against his back, wordless, insistent. “Do not get toothpaste on me,” he says. 

 

Brian walks sideways back to the sink but doesn’t let go of his grip around Bob’s waist, makes Bob stand with him while he rinses and spits, and then fits his face back into the space between Bob’s shoulderblades. Bob starts to walk toward the bedroom and Brian walks with him, still pressed against his back, like they are a single ungainly creature. 

 

“Light,” says Bob, and Brian reaches out, hits the bathroom light on their way out. When they get inside the bedroom door, Bob stops suddenly, and Brian guesses what he’s up to and twists away too late. Bob grabs him around the waist and flips him onto the bed, fast, crawls on top of him. 

 

“Fuck,” says Brian, low, encouraging, pushing up to meet him. Bob kisses him, one hand on his throat, and Brian thinks about the drymouthed, jittery way he’d felt watching Bob’s relaxed reticence turn into something else in the ring, how badly he’d wanted to know what it was like to have Bob crash into him like that. 

 

Bob lifts up his body a little, rises to his knees on either side of Brian’s hips, and says, “Get on your belly.” 

 

Brian twists over beneath him, feels Bob’s hands on his hips, dragging down his boxers, palming his ass. Then Bob’s hands are back on Brian’s shoulders, running down his arms, pushing his wrists into the mattress. “Let me know when you’re ready,” says Bob against the back of Brian’s neck, breath hot and close, and Brian nods. 

 

Bob works him open slowly, methodically, with one hand, the other still resting lightly on Brian’s crossed wrists. Brian pushes his face into the pillow and feels Bob above him, breathing in time with the strokes of his fingers. Brian think about how Bob does everything in the steady unerring fighter’s time measure of one-two – right-left, bam- _bam_ , like the familiar motion of bouncing once on the ball of his foot and then rolling forward on it, fast. 

 

Brian pushes his shoulders up, arches his spine just slightly, pushes his thighs farther apart, and Bob grunts in acknowledgment, shifts above Brian. He slides his arms to bracket Brian’s, forearms against forearms, palms pressing down lightly on Brian’s wrists. He drops a kiss on the back of Brian’s neck, and when he slides in his whole body is covering Brian’s, a warmth and steadiness above him. Brian takes in a ragged breath, tensing up, his foot sliding against Bob’s calf. 

 

“Schechter?” says Bob, pausing, his voice rough. 

 

Brian says, “Yeah, okay, come on,” pitching his voice low to keep it from shaking. 

 

Bob fucks him slow, steady, hard, and Brian squirms beneath him, pants, arches his neck back so his head falls on Bob’s shoulder, and Bob kisses his throat, beneath his ear. Brian can hear his own heartbeat, and Bob’s, pressed against his back, and the sweatslick slide of their bodies, and the fucked little begging noises he’s making in his chest. There isn’t a part of his body that isn’t covered by Bob’s body, and fuck, it’s so worth it to be a little guy sometimes. 

 

He can’t stop moving, his whole body shuddering, twitching, rolling up to meet Bob as he rolls down. Bob laughs, a huff of air against Brian’s neck, and says, “Quit it. Stay still.” 

 

“Sorry!” pants Brian, through his teeth. “Jesus. Feels good.” 

 

Bob kisses his shoulderblade, the back of his head. “Just relax,” he says. His voice is soft, unbearably sweet. “I got you.” 

 

Brian can feel the muscles of Bob’s arms and belly and thighs tensing and flexing when he’s close. He lets go of one of Brian’s arms to cup his chin, pull his head back, whisper in his ear. “You should come for me right now, Schechter,” he says, and Brian makes the kind of sound he’s only ever made in the dark, pressed between Bob and the mattress. Bob drops his head and rolls into Brian hard, rough. He comes holding the scruff of Brian’s neck lightly between his teeth like he’s a mama cat and Brian is a wayward kitten. 

 

*

 

Brian goes to see Travis that weekend. While he waits for Travie to buzz him up he hears Pete on the intercom, saying, “Where’d you put the –“ and Travie saying, “Leave it! put that down.” 

 

When Travis opens the door he hugs Brian before Brian can even get a look at him. Travis has to stoop over so far to embrace him, like a kindly, gangly grandfather, Brian the sheepish young whippersnapper. “Hey, lookit that,” he says into Brian’s shoulder. “It’s the only officer of the law I’m happy to have turn up on my doorstep.” 

 

They sit at the kitchen table and drink cold black coffee and smoke cigarettes. Travis pulls a mug full of watercolor brushes and murky water over and ashes into it, then pushes it over to Brian, companionably. Brian resists the urge to make a face of distaste. 

 

Pete hops into the room. He’s wearing one Ugg boot and tugging the other one on as he hops. Hemmy tags along behind him. “I’m serious, Travie,” he’s saying. “I need it, where is it?” He straightens up against the doorframe, sees Brian, and says, “Oh, hey there!” 

 

“Hey,” says Brian, smiling. 

 

“Need it!” says Pete to Travis, reaching out to snap his fingers in Travis’s hair. 

 

“Tough luck,” says Travie kindly. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles.” 

 

“Maybe, but that’s not how your mom’s cookie crumbled last night,” remarks Pete darkly, hopping out of the room, Hemmy following. 

 

“How’s Bob?” asks Travie, taking a sip of his coffee. 

 

“Good,” says Brian, clearing his throat. “He misses the fuck out of that dog, but he’s doing okay.” 

 

“Hmm-mmm,” says Travie. 

 

When Brian was first sobering up, one of the things he thought sometimes he absolutely could not take was the kindness in Travis’s warm raspy voice. It was just too much to face, to live up to. 

 

“Well, you know,” says Brian, shifting in his chair. “I don’t think he’s gonna leave me yet, at least, so that’s something. That’s really all I care about.” He means it to be a joke, but it doesn’t really come out that way, like most of the jokes he tries to tell to Travis. 

 

“I’m leaving!” calls Pete from the other room. “Last chance!” 

 

“Have fun with the future Beat poets of America, sweetie,” calls Travie back. 

 

“Oh, _god_ ,” says Pete, and slams the door. 

 

Travie waits for the clatter of Ugg boots on the stairs to subside, then stands and walks over to the couch. Balancing his coffee and cigarette in one hand, he digs under the cushions and retrieves the bright slick colorful pages of a brand new comic. He sits back down at the table, smoothes over the cover, sighs happily. 

 

“Oh, whatever,” he says, noticing Brian’s smile. “If I buy it, I get to read it first. Hey, before you go, I gotta show you this thing one of my kids did the other day.” 

 

He stands, goes over to his desk, which is overflowing with stacks of drawings and watercolor paintings. Travie teaches art in a public elementary school, and Pete tutors high school kids in English on the side while he’s working on his book. They live in a kind of noble squalor, and have been known to supplement their income by living off of dumpster-dived Panera bread and discounted Starbucks from Pete's barista/beatpoet protégés. 

 

Travie comes back with a drawing of a giant three-toed sloth hanging from a tree, with a waving human next to it helpfully for scale. “Madison did this,” he says, laying the drawing in front of Brian. “Apparently these fuckers once existed, twelve-foot-tall blind prehistoric sloths, gives me the heebie-jeebies.” 

 

“Wow,” says Brian. The sloth’s individual hairs – dark purple – are drawn with care, and Brian can see that his eyes are closed to indicate his blindness. There’s a natural grace to the way his limbs are draped over the tree branches that Brian is impressed with. “How old’s this kid?” he asks. 

 

“Eight,” says Travie, ashing his cigarette. 

 

“Wow,” says Brian again. He looks at the way Travie is regarding the picture, with pride and satisfaction but no surprise, no wonder. It reminds Brian of the steadiness with which Travis has greeted each birthday Brian’s had, like it never occurred to him to doubt that Brian could do this. Brian wonders how you say to a person, _you saved my life_ , how you make words carry that burden of meaning. Instead he looks some more at the eight-year-old’s purple prehistoric creature, trying to see it like Travie sees it, not as some anomaly or evidence of prodigy, but as a natural, dependable part of this kid’s humanity, like Travis sees Brian’s will to stay sober.  



	4. Chapter 4

The week after Duke's death, Brian is surprised by how quickly everything feels normal. There's a sense of lightness, relief. They'd known for some time that Duke was going to die, and for Brian the waiting had been the worst part, seeing Bob suffer along with Duke and seeing the secret, heartbreaking hope that Bob harbored and couldn't quite conceal, that maybe Duke would somehow miraculously get better. 

 

Now that it's over the part of Brian's mind that had been weighted down with anxiety about the whole situation feels liberated. Also gone are the tedious day-to-day minutia of caring for a body that is failing: trying to get Duke to eat, trying to get him to take his medicine, cleaning up after his incontinence, and, for Brian, the cynical, inescapable tickle at the back of his mind that asked whether all of this was really worth it.

 

But now there's also the weird startled blank look in Bob's eyes when he forgets and remembers, usually right after he wakes up or after he gets home, and that's something Brian wishes he never had to see. _Life is shit_ , the Travis-voice in his mind informs him. _Get to know this_. 

 

On their morning Starbucks run on Wednesday, before she passes Brian his cup, Ballato takes off the lid and looks at the coffee critically, tilting the cup. "Hold up," she says, business-like, "Fuckers spat in our lattés," and she reverses the cruiser back to the drivethru window. 

 

"Hey," she says to the kid, "What's the big idea? What's with the spit shot, wise guy?"

 

Brian hides behind his hand, trying not to laugh. The hipster kid at the window looks stricken, ashen. "It wasn't me!" she says. "Oh my god I am so sorry. Oh my god Dale's such a fucktard. Oh my god let me get you another one."

 

They get new lattés and Ballato tips the hipster kid. "Pigs are people too!" she calls cheerily before speeding away. 

 

"At least they didn't piss in it, you know," she says to Brian, passing him his new coffee. "Their operation is so smalltime."

 

Brian shakes his head, can't stop snorfling. 

 

" _What_?"demands Ballato, but she's grinning too. "It's not like I never spat in a pig's curly fries when I worked at Arby’s in high school. It's an understandable anti-authoritarian urge." She takes a long meditative sip. "God, I was the world's surliest goth kid."

 

Brian can't get past her calling the Starbucks kid _wise guy_. " _Wise guy_?" he says, disbelieving. "What, did you go to the Humphrey Bogart police academy?"

 

"Whatever!" says Ballato. "I'm sorry I didn't grow up in the Motor City! I'm sorry I didn't drop out of high school! I'm sorry my street cred is wack and I have to overcompensate!"

 

"Well, I'm sorry I didn't go to art school!" retorts Brian. This is a customary exchange, comforting in its familiarity, and requiring little active thought. "I'm sorry I wasn't in the Patsy Cline cover band!"

 

"Dolly Parton, fuck you very much," says Ballato, and she starts singing Coat of Many Colors.

 

Later, at a light, Brian asks Ballato, “Hey. So do you think Bob wants another dog? Or not yet? Or not at all?” 

 

Ballato says, “Jesus, I don’t know. Did you ask the guy?” 

 

“Not yet,” says Brian moodily. “He’s probably still upset.” 

 

“What about you?” asks Ballato. “Do you want another dog?” 

 

“I don’t care,” says Brian, startled. “It wasn’t my dog. I could give less of a fuck; I just want him to be happy.” 

 

"You honestly don't care that your pet of over a year is now fertilizer?" demands Ballato accusingly, briefly letting go of the wheel with both hands as she stuffs her empty coffee cup into this morning's bakery bag. "And don't give me the bullshit about how he wasn't yours. You lived with him, you walked him and fed him and took him to the vet, that makes him half your dog."

 

Brian waits til Ballato's left hand is back on the wheel. "Ten and two, please," he says.

 

"Oh, bite me!" says Ballato. "Lecture me after _you've_ taken seven billion hours of defensive driving classes! I could win the Indy 500 with my mad fucking defensive driving skills."

 

"I don't know," says Brian, ignoring her and answering the question. "I really just don't get the whole concept of pets. Why am I supposed to be attached to this animal that lives in my home? It's not like I need him to hunt elk anymore. Why haven't we evolved past that relationship?"

 

“Did you for real just use _elk hunting_ to explain your feelings?" asks Ballato incredulously. "Oh yeah, I forgot. Schechter: always got to be the butchest person in the car.” 

 

“Whatever,” says Brian. Another customary exchange. “I thought your boyfriend was a dyke the first two times I met him.” 

 

*

 

Brian still clearly remembers the day when Bob saw the old lady who lives next door to Brian out in the hall with her Pomeranian. 

 

"Hey," he said to Brian later that night. "Your building allows dogs?"

 

"Yeah," Brian had said, not really paying attention.

 

"Huh," said Bob. "How come you don't have one?"

 

"Because I don't want one," said Brian.

 

"Or a cat?" said Bob.

 

"I don't want one of those either," said Brian, patiently. 

 

They'd been seeing each other for about six months at that point, and Bob had started to spend most weekends over at Brian's. They ate together and watched TV together – pay-per-view fights that Bob made snide snarky comments about and the news – and slept together, sometimes staying in bed the entire weekend, but Brian remembers still being vaguely uncertain as to whether they were dating, or what. The issue had never been addressed.

 

"Huh," said Bob. "I miss having a dog."

 

That was the end of the conversation, but later, remembering it, Brian deduced that it was his building's pet policy that persuaded Bob to move in with him, more than anything. 

 

After Bob moved in and not long after Brian got sober, Brian was gradually made aware, over a period of several months, that Bob wanted them to get a dog. Bob never said this outright, but Brian was slowly learning how Bob communicated his needs and desires, indirectly but unwaveringly. Brian baulked, for a long time. He didn't want a dog. He couldn't imagine where he would summon the energy to be responsible for another living creature's total well-being, when he already felt, in a very real sense, responsible for the safety and happiness of an entire city. He was also terrified by the idea of _them_ adopting a dog, together. This kind of clear gesture of commitment felt foolish to Brian, embarrassingly extravagant, because at this point he was still absolutely certain that he and Bob would break up. It was not like he _wanted_ this to happen; he just felt resigned to it, in much the same way as he felt resigned to his own eventual death. You don't have to _dwell_ on it, but why act like it won't happen? 

 

"The thing is," Brian said late one night, when Bob had made another of his patient, sideways allusions, "The thing is, at this point, I'm barely supposed to have a plant. Do you know what I'm saying?"

 

Bob was quiet. It was very rarely that either of them referred directly to Brian's recovery, as neither of them had referred directly to his addiction. "I understand," he said quietly.

 

"It's not that I don't want you to have a dog – "

 

" _I_ don't want to have a dog," said Bob, rolling over and looking directly at Brian. "I want _us_ to have a dog."

 

Brian felt his whole body tighten, clench with dread. Everything about this relationship – the novelty of spending time with Bob sober, the small allowances they made for each other in what kind of shampoo they bought and what time they went to bed, the way Bob's skin felt against Brian's, warm with sleep – felt impossibly precious and fragile. It seemed like the smallest thing could utterly unravel it, and a dog is not a small thing. 

 

When Brian finally spoke, he said, "That's not what I want," and Bob nodded, looked away from Brian. 

 

It seemed like he was going to let it go, take it easy, but then he cleared his throat and pointed out calmly, "It's what I want, though."

 

"Well. We want different things, then," said Brian, in his reasonable cop-voice. 

 

They were lying on their sides in bed, looking at each other in the dark. Bob reached out and touched Brian's face, a sudden gesture of tenderness that was unusual for Bob. He brushed his fingertips over the skin beneath Brian's eyes, over the bridge of his nose, and drew back his hand. The gesture seemed involuntary; Bob seemed almost not to notice that he'd done it.

 

"I don't think we do, really," he said, gently.

 

Brian didn't know what Bob meant, but the plain, intent way he was looking at Brian made him feel flustered, annoyed. He said, "Come here," waited til Bob rolled obligingly closer. "Let me think about it, okay?" he said quietly, pushing the top of his head up under Bob's chin, hard, like an impatient goat. "Just shut up about it and let me think it through."

 

"You think too much, that's your whole problem," said Bob, letting Brian push against him, shove out his frustration, and then nudging him onto his back.

 

They went looking for a shelter dog a few weeks after that. Brian still didn't want to, but it became easier to acquiesce than to continue resisting Bob's patient yearning. They finally found both Dixie and Duke, clearly of a pair and clearly exactly what Bob wanted. Their hearts were sweet and uncomplicated, and over time Brian began reluctantly to love them, and accepted them into his life as they accepted him, with shy but unquestioning warmth and goodwill.

 

*

 

The rest of Brian and Ballato's Wednesday has to do with a break-in at a pawn shop. The owner's name is Valencio, and the whole time they take his statement he keeps looking back and forth between Schechter and Ballato like there's a magic trick going on and he's waiting for the reveal. When Ballato goes around back to look at the busted lock, Valencio leans in and says to Brian in a gleeful, confiding tone, "You really lucked out there, huh, getting a hottie for a partner."

 

Schechter looks at the man, and he feels filled with an inexpressible, existential weariness. "I did luck out," he says. "Officer Ballato is one of the best cops in the district." 

 

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," says Valencio. "Ever get a little action in the squad car? I saw a porno like that once."

 

Brian says, "OFFICER BALLATO!"

 

Valencio blanches, startled, and Ballato rounds the corner in a matter of seconds, hand on her gun. "Yes, Officer Schechter?" she says.

 

"Mr. Valencio here would like to know if I ever get a little action in the squad car. He saw a porno like that once."

 

"Hey now!" says Valencio, putting up his hands in a _don't pin this on me_ gesture.

 

"Oh really?" says Ballato lightly. She steps closer to Valencio, not removing her hand from her gun. "How come, is he offering something?"

 

Valencio laughs nervously, looking at Brian like he expects Brian to help him out. "I was just making a joke," he says.

 

"You think it's funny to make lewd insinuations about an officer of the law?" asks Ballato. There's a very familiar steely glint in her eye that sharply contrasts with her relaxed posture.

 

"No," says Valencio, in a pained voice. He's now backed against his counter, Ballato standing right in front of him, in his space.

 

"No?" says Ballato, softly.

 

"No, ma'am," says Valencio after a pause, eyes downcast.

 

"That's good, shit for brains," says Ballato."Because if you think your life is hard right now, you cannot even begin to imagine how hard your life would be if you took it into your head to disrespect me or to try and prevent me from doing my job or to fuck with me in any way. Am I being clear?"

 

"I understand," says Valencio, sounding like he's forcing the words out against all his instincts.

 

"You do?" says Ballato. "Oh, well, then, that's good. We can continue with the investigation now, can't we, Officer Schechter?"

 

After they finish, Ballato sits in the cruiser and drums on the wheel. Schechter sits quietly beside her, knowing she's working through the adrenaline she wasted not punching the guy out. "Christ on a cross," she says finally. "You stomp 'em down and stomp 'em down and they just pop right the fuck back up."

 

Brian nods, looks out the window. It would be inappropriate for him to pretend to empathize with Ballato in this, act like he knows what it's like. He can only make it clear whose side he's on. "You did a good job in there," he says. "You handled it good."

 

"If we find the guy who robbed him, remind me to give him a gold medal," she says, starting the car. "Let's go stresseat."

 

After work Brian picks up Bob and they get food and go home. Bob’s talking about something that annoys him, some guy he’s been sparring with and his piss-poor attitude, and how Jamia's stressed out about her big fight coming up. Brian does that thing where he listens just enough and doesn’t remember any of it. He's thinking about how the shit Ballato sloughs through every day just trying to do her job never seems to stick to her, weigh her down, how she still likes what she does, and how miraculous that is. The same is true of Bob, really, and where does it come from, that dogged, inhuman persistence? Apparently Brian is quite attracted to people who possess it. 

 

After they eat, Bob sits on the couch in the living room and says mournfully, “I want to eat a bundt cake. An entire. Bundt cake.” 

 

Brian sits on the floor at his feet, between his knees, flicking through the news channels, and says, “Bundt cake, what the fuck.” 

 

“I dunno,” says Bob. “I don’t fucking know, but I want it.” 

 

*

 

In the backseat of Brian’s car three years ago, Bob had finished buttoning his jeans and said, “Gimme your phone.” 

 

Brian, drunk and post-orgasmic, felt dizzy, oxygen-deprived. He shoved himself into his own pants and felt around on the floor for the phone, handed it to Bob without a word. 

 

Bob, cigarette already in his mouth but unlit, flipped open the phone and punched his number in, handed it back without comment. Then he opened the door and got out, slamming it behind him, and Brian felt a momentary white-hot flash of anger – dude wasn’t even gonna say _goodnight_ or _thanks for sucking me off_ , or even _you had the wrong idea_? – before the driver’s side door opened and Bob got back in. 

 

“Keys,” he said, reaching back over the seat. 

 

“I can drive,” said Brian, knee-jerk defensive. 

 

“You’re wasted, dude, gimme the keys,” said Bob patiently. “It’s no problem.” 

 

Brian wanted to protest snarkily that he was _far_ from wasted, Bob had not seen wasted, but he handed the keys over instead. “Hold on,” he said, and climbed up to the front, wiggling between the seats. After he snapped his seatbelt on, he looked up and saw Bob grinning at him, hair and eyes and lipring catching the pale streetlight glow. 

 

“What?” Brian said, disgruntled. 

 

“Nothing,” said Bob. “You’re a little dude, is all. Bantamweight.” 

 

“Oh, fuck you,” said Brian. 

 

They drove in silence, except for Brian telling Bob where to turn. When they got there, Brian sat still, unsure whether Bob wanted to come in, what was up, and then Bob looked down at his hands on the steering wheel and laughed. 

 

“Oh shit,” said Brian, getting it. “How are you gonna get home?” 

 

Bob leaned back against the seat, laughed again. “See, now I know you’re drunk,” he said. 

 

“Fuck you,” said Brian. “Do you wanna come up? I’ll drive you home in the morning.” 

 

“Naw,” said Bob. “It’s okay, I’ll catch a bus.” 

 

“Okay,” said Brian. 

 

They got out of the car. Bob handed him the keys, put his hands in his hoodie pockets. “You should call me sometime," he said, already walking away, backwards. 

 

“Yeah,” said Brian, “For sure.” 

 

He watched Bob turn around and walk a block without looking back, and then he went upstairs and drank a few shots and fell asleep on his couch. 

 

Over the next couple of days, sitting in the cruiser or in his living room with a bottle of bourbon, he sometimes flipped open his phone and thumbed through the contacts til he got to Bob’s number. He’d sit there and look at it for a minute, and then flip the phone shut, look out the car window, take another drink. 

 

* 

 

On weekend mornings Brian usually sleeps late, the week catching up to him, and a leftover habit from his hangover days. On Sunday morning, a week and a day after Duke slipped off this mortal coil, he wakes up a little when Bob rolls over, gets out of bed. Bob reaches back to rest his palm gently on Brian’s belly for a second, meaning, _sorry I woke you_ , and _go back to sleep_. Brian runs a hand over his face and complies. 

 

When he wakes up the sun is bright in the bedroom and Dixie is sitting three feet from his face, staring patiently. 

 

“Hey,” croaks Brian, clearing his throat. “Hey girl.” 

 

Dixie gives him a long level look. 

 

“Okay,” says Brian. “Jesus. Alright.” 

 

He rolls out of bed, pisses, puts on his jeans and a t-shirt and one of Bob’s hoodies. It comes down almost to his knees and he has to roll the sleeves up. Bob hates it when Brian wears his clothes. He makes coffee and takes Dixie to the dog park. 

 

It’s cold, and Brian sits and smokes and drinks his coffee and watches Dixie. He thinks about the guy who died in the back of the cruiser last year around this time, freezing and racked with the DT's and probably sick of something deeper, lung cancer maybe. That was a shitty day. He takes Dixie home and drives to Worm’s. 

 

The inside of the gym smells like sweat and chalk and Lysol. When Brian comes in the door, Jamia, skipping rope in the corner, sees him and skips over. 

 

“Hey,” she says between skips, the _thwack_ of the leather rope. She’s grinning, and it takes Brian a minute to realize it’s because of Bob’s hoodie. He shrugs, makes an embarrassed _whatever_ face, and she says, “No, man, I didn’t say anything,” and skips off. 

 

Brian goes and sits on the wall. Ilya’s camped out there, chewing tobacco and watching the two practice rings intently. Brian nods at him, arranging his face into a respectful expression, cause for some reason Bob gets pissed at him if he doesn’t treat these washed-up old guys like revered elders, but Ilya just makes a sour face with his good eye and shoves his tobacco into his cheek. 

 

Bob’s in the ring with Whitesides, and Brian settles in to watch them. He used to get edgy watching Bob spar, his cop’s instincts prompting him to defuse any kind of confrontational situation, but he’s seen it so often now that his brain settles easily into the repetitive groove of the practice round: three-minute fight bell, one-minute rest bell. Worm is sitting between the two practice rings, dividing his attention between the occupants of both of them, occasionally calling out one-syllable instructions to the fighters. 

 

Whitesides is a heavyweight, a lot bigger and rangier than Bob, and he’s got a goofy, jokey face and a leveling hook. He’s a powerhitter, a bodyslammer, and Bob is too, but fighters like Whitesides force him to pick up his speed, work on his jab. Brian leans his elbows on his knees, watches them circle. Whitesides has a good few inches of reach on Bob, so Bob is focusing on his in-and-out, quick shots at the head, _pop pop pop_. 

 

When the one-minute bell rings, Whitesides leans over the rope and listens good-naturedly to Worm berate him about dropping his left. Bob stays on the other side of the ring, taking off his gloves and leaning on the ropes while he drinks from his water bottle. Sweat darkens his hair, plasters it against his face. He does the thing where he drops his right wrist down to his side before he rolls it, a little piece of transparent subterfuge that makes Brian feel equal parts tender and pissed-off. When he looks up and sees Brian, he grins, tilts his water bottle at him in a silent, gentlemanly little gesture of acknowledgment, and then turns back before the bell rings. 

 

Gloves back on, Bob throws the quick feint and jab at Whitesides’ left ear that was working for him last round, but Whitesides was listening to Worm and he’s got his left up now, counters fast and strong. Next to Brian, Ilya makes a dismissive little sound, seeing Whitesides land his first body punch of the round. Brian glances over at him, impatient, can’t help asking, “What?” 

 

Ilya chews for a second and then shoves the wad into his cheek. “Softhands,” he says derisively, jerking his chin to indicate Bob, and Brian feels a flare of anger flash up his spine, white-hot. He's bothered both by the senseless meanness of it, and how it reminds him of what Worm told Brian not long ago when Brian went to see him about Bob.

 

“That’s enough,” he says. His voice has a warning in it that makes Ilya shoot him a fast, startled look and give a single nod. 

 

At the end of the hour, Bob and Whitesides bump shoulders, Whitesides slinging his arm around Bob and smacking a kiss on the side of his head. Bob climbs under the rope and heads for the door, hands still wrapped, calling out, "Smoke break!," not in Brian's direction in particular. 

 

Brian meets him at the bench outside, beneath the small gold plaque on the brick wall that says _Worm & Cortez_, in small letters, primly, like the sign outside a lawyer's office. Ilya follows lethargically, taking care to settle back down right between Brian and Bob. Brian shifts to pull his Marlboros and lighter from his back pocket. 

 

“How’s it going,” he says to Bob, around Ilya. 

 

“Good,” says Bob, jerking his chin up, and Brian leans over to put a cigarette in Bob’s mouth and light it so he doesn’t have to unwrap his hands. 

 

“Whitesides,” says Bob heavily around the cigarette, and gives a little _what can you do_ headshake. Brian watches him smoke. 

 

Bob cuts him a little look and says, “What the fuck are you wearing.” 

 

Brian shrugs. 

 

“You look like a duck,” says Bob around the cigarette. 

 

“A duck, what duck, that don’t make no sense,” says Ilya, dyspeptically. He seems completely unaware that his presence between them might be intrusive, unwelcome.

 

“Well, what he’s wearing don’t make no sense either,” says Bob reasonably. He stands and shuffles to look back in the door, squinting. “Worm!” he yells, suddenly suspicious. “You better not be putting me up with Iero next.” 

 

Brian can hear Worm answer with a single dismissive syllable, a kind of _harrumph_. 

 

“You’re just scared to scrap with someone who knows what to do with their left hand,” calls Frankie. “This dude only knows what his right hand’s for.” 

 

“Dude, left hand’s for that too,” says Whitesides in his weird, happy, flat voice. “I can work it both ways, know what I’m saying.” 

 

Bob sits back down on the bench, finishes his cigarette without using his hands. Brian leans over Ilya periodically to take it from Bob's mouth, ash it, put it back, Bob grunting his thanks. Ilya looks back and forth between Bob and Brian like they are strange creatures in a zoo and he is impatient with their inexplicableness.

 

Jamia comes out with Frank and Warren, another of the old fighter guys. She holds the door open for Warren while he shuffles with his bad hip. He's saying, "Those Europeans, they got a whole other idea of the sport, is all I'm saying. There's no telling what kind of crazy stuff she's been teaching those fighters of hers."

 

"Something that makes 'em keep winning, whatever it is," says Jamia, lighting up and bouncing on her heels in front of the bench. She grins at Brian and Brian grins back.

 

"Stop talking to her about Ivarsson, it just makes her anxious," says Frank to Warren, accusingly. Warren holds up his palms defensively, subsides. 

 

Jamia doesn't look anxious to Brian, just sweaty and pleasant. "Is that your big fight? Ivarsson?" he asks. On the other end of the bench, Frank sighs but says nothing.

 

"She's the trainer," says Jamia. "She's hot stuff, moved here from Sweden not too long ago. Worm's worried she's gonna steal all his thunder."

 

"How soon's the big night?" asks Brian. Last couple of weeks, Jamia's been on the steadily accelerating training schedule fighters go on leading up to a big match, like tuning a machine to the very peak of possible perfection. Brian knows he's been hearing about her fight for a while, but sometimes he's not good at focusing in on that stuff, paying enough attention. 

 

"Almost here," says Jamia. "Next week." She smiles at Frank, who's smoking, looking at the sidewalk. "I'm not worried," she says firmly, looking back at Brian. "I'll take Ivarsson's rookie kid, no problem."

 

"Take her to _town_ , baby," says Warren, delighted by Jamia's brazenness.

 

"Take her like you take a _shit_ ," agrees Jamia. "Hey. Guess they don't know about us Jersey kids over there in fancy Scandinavia, huh?" she says, nudging Frank's toe with her toe. 

 

"They don't know shit," says Frank, looking up at her. "Little miss Hansel-and-Gretel won't even see what's coming til it's too late."

 

Brian hangs out at Worm’s all afternoon, and when Bob’s done they go get sandwiches at the Greek place on the next block. They don't talk about Duke. They talk about the pop band upstairs-kid Crawford's started with a bunch of people with the same name, and they talk about Jamia's upcoming fight some more. "Last month, we went to a couple of Salpeter's fights around the city," says Bob, picking apart his pita bread. "That's who Jamia's up against, Salpeter. She's a little younger. There's been a bunch of buzz about her, around. Twenty-two and two, since she turned pro."

 

"That's some record," says Brian.

 

"Jamia's is nothing to laugh at, either," says Bob, quickly. "And she's got more experience."

 

"Yeah," says Brian. He feels like he should be cautious with this; Bob's not meeting his eyes. Bob loves fairness more than almost anything, Brian's learned over time. Disadvantage of any kind prickles at him, gets under his skin. This unusually fierce attachment to justice, to the correct order of things, is how Brian's learned to connect all of the things about Bob that seem unrelated but really aren't, like how much he loves the fight game and how much stray dogs upset him and his phobic loathing of illness and injury. "Jamia's a real solid fighter. I'm sure she'll be fine."

 

Bob nods. "Jay went to two of Salpeter's fights, but then she wanted to stop. Said it made her too nervous to do her any good. And she was worried Ivarsson would spot her, think she was spying for Worm." 

 

"Ivarsson sounds scary," says Brian.

 

Bob shrugs. "She just knows what she's doing," he says. "She knows how sharp you gotta stay."

 

Brian knows the waitress, named Marla. When she brings them more coffee, he asks her, pitching his voice low, how Roger’s doing. 

 

“Still inside,” she says, making a wry face, setting the coffee pot down on the table. 

 

“Didn’t make parole, then?” 

 

“No,” she says, “But it’s for the best.” 

 

Across from Brian, Bob is inspecting his hands, looking at the calluses on his palms, like he does when he thinks something’s not his business. Marla smiles at him warmly before she walks away from the table, and he looks up, startled, and smiles back. 

 

“Don’t tell me the story,” he says when she’s gone, before Brian can speak. “It’s her life, not yours, I don’t wanna know about it.” 

 

“I wasn’t going to tell you the story,” says Brian mildly. 

 

“You looked like you were going to tell me the story,” insists Bob, suspiciously. 

 

Brian stretches his foot out under the table, pokes Bob’s shin. Bob grins down at his sandwich crusts. “Don’t wear my clothes, it makes you look like a kid,” he says. “A little orphan kid.” 

 

Brian looks down, pushes the sleeves up farther on his wrists. “I like it,” he says. “They smell like you.” When he looks back up, Bob is giving him the startled, intent, soft stare that means _you are getting laid tonight_. 

 

On the drive home, Brian thinks about what Ilya said, _softhands_ , and he looks over at Bob in his beanie, humming along with the radio. 

 

The refrigerator in Travie and Pete's apartment is covered in alphabet magnets, the big kind little kids play with. The first time Brian was over at their place, he stood in front of the refrigerator while the coffee finished brewing and read the messages they spelled out for each other in the bright plastic letters. _MORE MILK_ , one said, another, _WHERE THE FUCK IS RED FOX?_ But in the middle of the freezer door, an empty space around it like an emphasis, it said, _WITHOUT YOU I'M JUST ME_. Brian moved away before Travis could come back in the room and see what he was looking at. He wasn't sure why he felt overwhelmed by it, until he realized that he recognized it, the feeling in the words.  



	5. Chapter 5

When Brian went to talk to Worm in his office for the first time a few weeks ago, he went by himself when Bob was at home, stopping on his way back from the grocery store. He felt furtive, dishonorable, like he was spying on Bob, checking up on him. Bob had never ever checked up on Brian, even when he was drunk every night, out somewhere losing himself in the backrooms and the barlight. But Brian couldn't ignore the worry anymore; it was consuming him, turning into something closer to a constant low-grade panic. Brian didn't talk to Worm a lot, but whenever he did he had begun to notice a serious discrepancy between what Worm said he thought about Bob's injury and what Bob told Brian Worm thought about his injury.

 

This is Bob's biggest fault, in Brian's eyes, maybe his only fault: he makes light of things that harm him with an almost pathological persistency, because they terrify him and make him feel powerless, and if he acknowledges them, somehow that might give them an even greater power over him. 

 

Brian sat parked down the block from Worm's for a minute, tapping on the steering wheel, collecting his thoughts. Whitesides was leaving when Brian finally went in, and the lights in the main, high-ceilinged room of the gym were shut off, the shapes of the bodybags standing stiffly in the shadows. Whitesides grinned, held the door open for Brian before it swung shut and locked on its own. "He left a while ago," Whitesides said.

 

"That's okay," said Brian. "I'm looking for Worm." He felt disconcerted, like always, by the ease and openness with which almost everyone in the world treated the couple-unit of him and Bob, because it was so different from the sideways, lowkey, unacknowledged way they had kind of sidled into being together. Brian couldn't imagine a point in time when Bob would have felt like saying to Whitesides, _Hey, you know that cop that comes around a lot? Me and him are banging._ They never told anyone, but somehow everyone knew.

 

"In his office," said Whitesides. "I think he lives there, y'know. I think his desk has a hideybed."

 

Brian laughed, and Whitesides saluted him with his gloves, strolled on down the street whistling.

 

Brian made his way through the dark empty gym to the back, where he could see the leak of light under Worm's office door. He knocked, palmed the back of his neck. From inside, Worm said, "Yeah! but no if it's Dan again, I already gave you my answer."

 

"What's Dan want?" asked Brian, leaning his head in and smiling.

 

"More than he can handle," sighed Worm, looking up from the circle of lamplight cast on his desk. "Come in, Officer, come in."

 

Worm always calls Brian _Officer_. He's a very courteous fellow.

 

"I'm sorry to bother you," began Brian, but Worm shook his head brusquely, gestured to the chair in front of his desk. Brian sat, feeling meek, like he had been granted an audience. Worm reminded Brian sometimes of a fat, inked-up, badass Dumbledore.

 

Worm steepled his hands, inspected Brian. "He doesn't know you're here," he said, no questioning inflection to his voice.

 

"Yeah," said Brian. "I dunno, I just thought it might be easier."

 

"You're concerned," said Worm. "It's understandable."

 

Brian cleared his throat. "I've talked to his orthopedist, and she says it's going to get worse and worse as long as he keeps putting stress on the tendons. But he's not very – " Brian paused, started over. "I think he still thinks he can just wait on it and it will magically get better."

 

"He is not an amenable man," agreed Worm. "Not a man who concedes defeat easily." Brian nodded. He looked over Worm's shoulder, read Bob's name on one of the fight posters on the wall. _BC Bryar, thirty-seven and five, thirteen by KO_. When his eyes shifted back to Worm's, he saw that Worm was blinking at him through his glasses, a softness in his beady eyes.

 

"This is the thing," he said, and his voice had shifted from its usual jovial, lovingly exasperated tone. He sounded gentle and calm, like doctor explaining bad news to a frightened patient. “Bob’s hands, his wrists, aren’t built to withstand the power he’s got. His bones can’t take it, it’s just a fact. Nothing about him, nothing about the kind of fighter he is. It’s just an unfortunate trick of nature.” Worm shrugged, a majestic movement, leaned back in his chair. “Some fighters are born with hands that can take anything, and some just aren’t.” 

 

Brian nodded, shifted in his chair, cleared his throat. “Do you think – shouldn't he just retire then? Isn't that the best option?” 

 

Worm let his chair legs thump back onto the floor, considered this. He didn’t meet Brian’s eyes, looked over his shoulder instead. “Thing is,” he said finally. “Like you say, I can give him advice, but I can’t tell him what to do. Can’t tell any of my fighters what to do, when you get right down to it, but with Bob it’s a special case.” 

 

“Special?” prompted Brian, when Worm seemed inclined to leave it at that. 

 

“As old as Bob is,” said Worm gently. “As old as he is, and as late as he started fighting for real. Most fighters would be at eighteen, nineteen where he is at twenty-eight. Through no real fault of his own, that’s just how things happened. I’m lucky I found him when I did, and I've never regretted giving him a chance. But the thing is that he lost a lot of time, and when he’s working so hard to get it back, I can’t be the thing that makes him step away. I can’t live with that. As long as he can get a fair fight, I’ll stay behind him.” 

 

Brian nodded, jaw tight, and didn’t ask what could be fair about a fight when one of its contestants is sometimes unable, even on his good days, to use a can opener or twist off a bottle cap. 

 

They sat in silence for a moment, and then Worm cleared his throat and started talking again. He talked to Brian about pain management, keeping up the physical therapy, and told him about the surgery he’d been hearing great things about, how a fighter down in Atlanta had had it done and got in three more good years before he retired. "Bob won't hear of it," he said. "Doesn't want to be out of the ring that long. But maybe he'll come around. Pain is amazingly persuasive."

 

When Brian was leaving, after they had shaken hands, Worm said, “Hey.” 

 

Brian stopped in the doorway, looked back. 

 

Worm said, “This is all he’s ever wanted. You know that, right?” His voice was startlingly soft, and he blinked at Brian owlishly through his little glasses. This was something, even after his three years with Bob, that never stopped catching Brian by surprise, the uncomplicated sweetness that was under the skin of almost every good guy Brian had ever met in the fight game. 

 

Brian nodded. “I know,” he said. “I get it, I do.” 

 

But he knew the truth was that he saw only part of the picture, because that was all Bob allowed him to see. Bob spoke only elliptically of the years before he started fighting, of bouncing from city to city as a cut man, or a low-level trainer, or the guy who cleaned the blood off the canvas. He had followed the fight game like the circus, hungry for it, feeding off its energy like a restless parasite. He was unsatisfied by life outside of the bubble of the ring, where the world narrowed down to two heartbeats, four fists, all or nothing. He wanted inside, and when Worm came up to him at a fight in Detroit – after Bob had put Disashi Lumumba’s shoulder back in its socket and Disashi back on his track to becoming welterweight champion of the world – and said, “I’m leaving this city and I need new fighters; I heard you used to have a solid left cross,” Bob told him right then and there that he would do anything. 

 

Brian’s heard that story, and he knew enough at least to read beneath the surface of the casual, precise way Bob told it. 

 

* 

 

When two weekends had passed after the Halloween of Frankie's birthday party and their first fumbling, frantic time in Brian's car, it was finally Bob who called Brian. 

 

“Got your number from Frankie,” he said. It was evening, and Brian had winced when he saw Bob’s name come up. He had answered despite the familiar tightening in his chest, the one that reminded Brian, _you fucked up_. 

 

“Yeah,” said Brian, resting his forehead against the refrigerator, alone in his kitchen. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call. I said I would, and I wanted to. There’s not really an excuse.” 

 

“Yeah, it was pretty douchey,” agreed Bob. Brian couldn’t tell if he was smiling. 

 

“I wanna see you,” said Brian finally, after a pause. With his finger he traced the edge of the CPD magnet on his fridge that held up takeout menus. 

 

“See, like, ‘fuck in the backseat of my car again,’ or what,” said Bob. 

 

Brian closed his eyes, pressed his knuckles into his eye socket. “No,” he said. “Like, for real. Like, go out somewhere, eat something, have a conversation.” 

 

“Well,” said Bob. “If you’re not just saying that, I’m hungry right now and all I have in my kitchen is Wheat Thins and cornflakes.” 

 

“I’ll come pick you up,” said Brian. 

 

He put on his old punk-kid denim jacket and the chain he used to wear and a baseball cap. In the mirror, he surprised himself by not looking like a cop or a drunk. He looked like he could pass for a guy going on a date. 

 

They went to a basement pizza place. Brian chaindrank a bunch of beer and tried not to stare at the fair fringe of Bob’s hair under his black beanie, or the faint shadows under his eyes, or how pale the skin of his throat was, or the way his mouth looked when he pressed his chin down into his chest and tried not to grin at something Brian said. 

 

“So how come you’re a boxer,” Brian asked. 

 

Bob shrugged, not looking up from his plate. “I like to fight,” he said. “How come you’re a cop?” 

 

“I have a God complex,” said Brian. After he said it, he realized it didn’t really explain what he meant, how he always felt like he was built to take care of people, look out for them. _God_ - _complex_ sounded like he wanted to control people, judge them. But it made Bob laugh. He glanced up at Brian, hesitated for a second, and Brian tried to guess which of the usual questions was coming. 

 

“Have you ever shot anybody?” asked Bob. He sounded impersonally curious. 

 

Sometimes Brian lies when he’s asked this, but he said, “Yeah.” 

 

Bob nodded, accepting. 

 

The guy’s name was Dale Harris. He was jacking a liquor store and he pulled a gun on the clerk. After he got off duty, Brian sat in the ICU waiting room for eleven hours until the man’s heart finally gave out. He remembers staring at the Skittles in the waiting room vending machine and thinking, _I will do anything, I will stop drinking, I will donate a kidney, please don’t do this to me_. He still goes to see Harris’s wife every few months. Her name’s Betsey. It’s awkward and sad and horrifying for both of them, and Brian has to sit in his car in front of her house for twenty minutes, sweating, before he works up the courage to go in, while she sits inside and pretends not to see his car, but the whole thing is necessary for both of them. 

 

Outside the pizza restaurant there was a woman with a German Shepherd standing talking on her phone, and Bob grinned at the dog the way Brian had seen women of a certain age smile helplessly at strangers’ babies. Bob met the woman’s eyes, and when she smiled at him in permission, he shoved his cigarettes back in his pocket and dropped to his knees on the sidewalk, grabbing the dog’s head. The dog and Bob made pleased noises at each other while Brian stood with his hands on his pockets, feeling goofy with it, amazed that this guy was giving him the time of day. 

 

He drove Bob home and they sat in front of his building. Brian had some kind of dating paradigm in his head that told him they shouldn’t have sex after what he guessed was their first actual date, so he cleared his throat and started to say, “I really will call you this time –” but Bob made an impatient sound in his throat and grabbed Brian by the front of his shirt. “Oh hell, no,” he said, “Not after you’ve been looking at me like that all night,” and kissed him hard. 

 

“Fuck,” panted Brian, shoving his hand under Bob’s beanie to get a fistful of his hair. “Fuck, I thought I was playing it so cool.” Bob laughed. There was a thread of saliva suspended from Brian's teeth to Bob’s lipring, and he chased it back to Bob’s mouth.

 

"I thought you were gonna – " Bob paused to bite Brian's jaw, and Brian made a small sound in his throat, head falling back against the seat, and felt mortified by it, " – crawl under the table and suck me off right there."

 

Brian was startled by this, by the straightforward way Bob said it, like he'd been startled on the phone earlier by how easily Bob had referred to their Halloween backseat shenanigans. This was not an ease he had expected from Bob, with his general air of standoffishness, but it thrilled Brian.

 

Bob lived in a crappy rundown apartment building, and the lights in the stairwell and the fourth floor hallway were out. Again, said Bob. "There's junkies," he added, as if in explanation. Making their way up the stairs in the dark, Bob muttering _motherfucker_ under his breath, Brian had the absurd urge to walk in front of Bob, protectively.

 

"Hold up," Bob said when they got to the fourth floor. One of his hands came out to touch Brian's side, apologetically, his fingers brushing against Brian's ribs through his shirt and jacket. "I gotta go yell at the super."

 

"Okay," said Brian. "Yeah, sure, definitely." He couldn't tell if he was stuttering. In the dark, the way Bob had casually reached out and touched him, the intimacy of the gesture, floored Brian, made his whole body ache strangely.

 

The super's door was at the end of the hall, and Bob had to knock persistently before it was cracked open. "Yeah, the fuck," said a gravelly, genderless voice, around the television noise.

 

"Lights are out again in the stairs," said Bob.

 

"Okay, you've told me," said the super, making to close the door. Bob stopped it with his foot.

 

"Seriously," he said. "Old people live here, they can't be walking around in the dark."

 

"Alright, fine, jesus," said the super. "I'll get it tomorrow, is that good enough?"

 

"Whatever," said Bob, removing his foot. The super slammed the door.

 

Brian, who'd been leaning on the wall during this exchange trying to control his breathing, wondered whether Bob had done research for this date. He pictured Bob on the phone with Jamia. "Oh, yeah," she'd have said. "All you gotta do to get into Schechter's pants is demonstrate a little concern for the elderly. That's an ironclad in. He'll blow you in the hallway of your skeevy apartment building."

 

"I live in a shithole," said Bob, not sounding embarrassed.

 

"Yeah," said Brian, clearing his throat. "There's a lot worse, though, you know."

 

"Oh yeah, I know," said Bob, unlocking his door.

 

They went through into the kitchen without turning the lights on, Brian following Bob. Bob leaned against the counter and pulled out a cigarette. "Want one?" he said around it, not looking at Brian while he flicked his lighter.

 

"I'm good," said Brian.

 

"Want something to drink? Want coffee?"

 

"I'm good," said Brian.

 

"You're good," mimicked Bob, exhaling over his shoulder, away from Brian. He reached out, grabbed hold of Brian's jacket, jerked him closer. Brian reached out awkwardly, unsure what Bob was going for, before Bob turned them both around, shoved Brian against the edge of the counter and let go of him.

 

"Shit," said Brian, reaching back to steady himself. Bob was really close, just kind of standing there, smoking and looking at Brian, face expressionless but with this look around his eyes like he wanted to smile. Brian reached out and touched Bob's chest through his hoodie, the hollow of his throat.

 

"Stop it," said Bob, without moving.

 

"Stop what," said Brian, touching the side of Bob's head, the soft, staticky hair sticking out from under his beanie.

 

"What you're doing," said Bob, reaching around Brian to ash into something on the counter.

 

"I'm not doing anything," said Brian, and Bob kissed him. 

 

Brian's head thunked back against the cabinet door. Bob said, "Hey," kind of nuzzling against Brian, and Brian nuzzled back. He shifted his feet, pushed his body up against Bob's. 

 

"Fuck," said Bob against Brian's jaw, his voice suddenly sounding thick and rough. He took a step back and Brian made an involuntary noise. 

 

Bob laughed, surprised sounding. "What," he said, mock-puzzled. "What, you don't want me to go away?"

 

"I don't want you to go away," said Brian. He could feel Bob's bodyheat, the strength beneath his sweetly awkward, self-contained posture. He wanted to grab Bob, shove against him, feel Bob shove back.

 

"Well, I'm not," said Bob, grinning, putting his cigarette back in his mouth and dropping to his knees, fast and graceless. 

 

Brian gripped the edge of the counter, looked down, dumb, as Bob tugged on his belt buckle.

 

"Lemme," said Brian, finding his voice.

 

"I got it," said Bob, pulling it through, grinning up at Brian, shaking his bangs out of his eyes.

 

Bob’s hair and the skin of his throat were so much softer than Brian would have imagined, and Brian couldn’t stop touching them. His eyes, looking steadily up at Brian in the dark, were very pale, and crinkled at the corners. Every now and then, he'd sit back on his heels and take a drag from the cigarette he still held in one hand, until Brian finally reached down and grabbed it from him blindly, making him laugh, and yanked his head back closer. 

 

After Bob sucked him off, Brian dragged him to his feet, and somehow they made it to the bedroom, stumbling, teeth knocking together. They slammed each other into walls, liking the feeling of knocking the breath out of one another, grabbing fistfuls of each other’s hair and clothes, greedy and clumsy. 

 

When Bob got inside him Brian couldn’t stop making these ragged feral noises in his chest, on his knees and elbows on Bob's bed, biting his wrists and the sheets and the pillow to try to keep quiet. “You want it, huh, Schechter,” said Bob behind and above him, his voice low and rough, hooking two fingers into the chain around Brian’s neck. Brian made an answering noise that was half a snarl, pushing back as Bob pushed into him, and Bob laughed, said, “ _Fuck_ , that’s hot.” 

 

Brian couldn’t remember the last time sex had felt like this, desperate and transformative, a feeling like wanting the other person to yank you out of your skin so you can be closer to them. He grabbed the headboard to brace himself, Bob licking up his spine, whispering fragments of things in his ear, some of them filthy – how good Brian was at taking it, how Bob had been thinking about getting him like this, on his hands and knees, all night – and some random, unconnected phrases Brian couldn’t make sense of. 

 

Brian twisted around enough to sink his teeth into Bob blindly – his shoulder, his biceps, Brian's teeth sliding on the slick of his skin. Bob said, "Shit, you're crazy," breathlessly, in a tone of awe and satisfaction, like Brian and his craziness was something Bob had personally discovered or invented. He reached around, gave Brian his arm to bite, and Brian gnawed on the bones of Bob's wrist like a hungry wolf. 

 

When Bob pulled out he rested one palm on the small of Brian’s back, a reassuring pressure, while he held the condom with the other hand. “I’ll be right back,” he said quietly, his voice sounding raw, used up, and he padded off to the bathroom. Brian flipped over onto his back, pressed his palms over his eyes, tried to catch his breath. 

 

When Bob returned he had a cigarette in his mouth, was holding his pants and looking through the pockets for a lighter. He grinned at Brian, his hair tousled and sweaty, and Brian felt his heart flip over neatly in his chest, like an Olympic gymnast. Perfect ten. “Fuck,” he said. “Jesus. Can I have a cigarette.” 

 

“Yeah,” said Bob. He crawled up to Brian, gave him a cigarette, lit it for him. They lay next to each other, smoking, and Brian thought about how he didn’t want to leave, how this moment wasn’t making him anxious and restless. 

 

“I wake up early,” he said finally. “I gotta be at the station by five. So I probably shouldn’t stay.” 

 

“I didn’t ask you to stay,” said Bob mildly, and then grinned when Brian turned his head to look at him, sharp. 

 

“Okay,” said Brian. “Forget I said that then. Pretend I’m still playing it cool.” 

 

“Okay,” smiled Bob. “Cause you’re so good at that.” 

 

Brian rolled over onto his belly and smoked and looked at Bob’s hands for a while. His knuckles were scabbed, fucked-up, and all his nails were short and blunt, except for the nails of his thumbs and forefingers, which were a little bit longer. Later, noticing that other fighters’ hands were the same way, Brian would figure out that it was to make it easier for them to unwrap their hands, to peel off the tape and gauze. He wanted to put Bob’s fingers in his mouth, bite them, but he took a drag off his cigarette instead. 

 

“What are you looking at?” said Bob, not unkindly. 

 

“Nothing,” said Brian. “You.” 

 

Bob’s hand came out in a head-cuffing gesture, but he ended up running his fingers through Brian’s hair instead, roughly. He slid down from his sitting position leaning on the headboard, grabbed the blankets and yanked them up over both of them. 

 

“I’m not staying!” said Brian, muffled beneath the covers, lifting his arm to hold his cigarette safely above the fabric. 

 

“I’m not letting you stay!” said Bob. 

 

“Okay!” said Brian. 

 

“Okay!” said Bob. “What do you do all day, anyway?” 

 

“I ride around in a car, and get all up in people’s problems,” said Brian. “What do you do all day?” 

 

“I punch a bag,” said Bob. “Then I punch a person. Then I punch a bag some more. Then I get bitched at by Worm. Then I fuck a hot cop.” 

 

“Oh wow,” said Brian. “I’m already part of your daily routine, then? That’s playing it cool, for sure.” Under the blanket he was grinning like an idiot. 

 

“I didn’t say you were the hot cop,” said Bob. “Jesus. I probably know a lot of hot cops. You’re not even that hot.” 

 

Brian fell asleep in Bob’s bed, and woke up, heart hammering, right when his alarm at home would have gone off. He was lying on his side and he could feel Bob’s belly against his back, the slow steady rhythm of his exhalations. He tried to get out of bed as silently and carefully as possible, but misjudged the distance to the floor and landed with a thump, hissing under his breath. Bob stirred and made an angry noise. 

 

“Sorry,” whispered Brian. He felt around on the floor for his clothes, squinted in the dark, trying to tell between his and Bob’s jeans. Bob rolled over and said something in his sleep, grumpily. 

 

Before he left, Brian walked around Bob’s apartment in the dark. He looked in Bob’s refrigerator, and his medicine cabinet, and his closet. He felt like a creeper, but not guilty enough about it to overcome his curiosity. He was interested in the kind of dental floss Bob used. He was interested in what Bob ate. He was interested by the fact that all the socks in his drawer were in pairs. He liked to think about Bob eating, and flossing, and organizing his socks. He hadn’t felt this interested by another human being in a long time. 

 

* 

 

Jamia's big fight is Tuesday night. Bob's working her corner as a cut man, so they pick her and Frank up and drive downtown together. Bob went with her to the weigh-in and medical exam the previous morning, where, he reported to Brian, she weighed in at an exact 135, the upper limit of the lightweight category. She's been eating steadily ever since then, and by fight time she'll have hit at least 139, 140.

 

On their way over to Frank and Jamia's apartment, Bob told Brian, pride and anticipation in his voice, "She's gonna win tonight. She's got this locked down," but she seems much more subdued than Brian is used to, her and Frankie both. She's still eating, steadily devouring a powerbar while she doublechecks the lock on their apartment door and walks downstairs, climbs in the backseat of Brian's car.

 

"I hate food," she says, wadding up the powerbar wrapper and moodily throwing it at Frank. "I will never eat again. Do you know how much macaroni I ate today?" she asks Brian, but before he can respond, she says, "Oh my god, what if Miss Hansel-and-Gretel is one of those monsters who can put on ten pounds in twenty-four hours? What if she's humongous?"

 

Frank throws the wrapper back at her halfheartedly and they lapse into silence.

 

"Why do you guys call her Hansel-and-Gretel?" asks Brian finally, to have something to say.

 

"Cause her name's Greta," says Frank. "Fuck kind of name is that for a pugilist, anyway?"

 

When they're almost there, Brian glances in the rearview mirror and sees Frank and Jamia holding hands tightly, knuckles pale, sitting tidily apart and looking out their respective windows. They look like a grieving couple on their way to a funeral. Brian's used by now to how differently fighters react to the charged hours before a match, some amping up, some becoming distant, silent, wrapped up in that pre-fight preoccupation, one foot in the real world and one foot already in the fight world, in its stark geometry. 

 

At the next two stoplights, Bob turns around, looks at Jamia intently, and she looks intently back. Sometimes Bob murmurs something, a half-phrase of advice or encouragement, things it sounds like Worm would say – "Don't let her wind you up, wear you out...Set it up and knock it down...Keep on her weak right," and Jamia says, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," – but mostly they just sit there looking at each other, like they're locked in this fierce, closed channel of silent communication, until the light changes and Brian reaches out, touches Bob's back to let him know. Frank just looks out the window, gripping Jamia's hand too hard. 

 

"Hey, Brian," says Jamia, when they're getting out of the car, "Wanna be in my corner?" 

 

"Sure!" says Brian, startled, "I mean, if it's okay with Worm." 

 

"It's fine," says Jamia. "It's a title fight, four people per corner. Worm likes you." Brian looks over at Bob for permission and Bob nods a little, almost imperceptibly.

 

Brian's never been in the corner for any of Bob's fights, never even been in the front row, but he thinks there's probably a good reason for that, like maybe the anxious leaden knot that appears in his belly whenever he watches Bob fight. Seeing Bob box for real, for a title, for a rank, is not at all like seeing him spar with people he's friends with in the chalky, sweaty, familiar testosterone den of Worm's reconstituted warehouse in Canaryville. This is a difference Brian was not remotely prepared for. 

 

Brian knows, though Bob's never said so, that Bob likes Brian to be there at his fights, whenever he can, and not just _at_ the fight but up there by the ring, where Bob could see him if he looked, though he never has, not even a glance. Brian can't handle it though; he's tried. The truth is, the second he sees some guy put his fist in Bob's face all he can think about and all he can feel is an overwhelming need to tear that guy's spine out of his skin and shove it down his throat. He can't sit still with this feeling, can't focus on anything else; it's real physical rage, making him sweat and twitch. 

 

In the dressing room in the basement, Brian watches Bob take out his cut kit. Frank sits under the mirror, still uncharacteristically quiet, watching Jamia stretch and jog in place. Bob leans in, touching Brian's back lightly, and whispers in his ear, "Take Frankie out for a smoke til it's time, okay?"

 

Brian nods. He thinks about how he feels at Bob's fights, and wonders if Frank is feeling some version of this, but when they go stand on the sidewalk, Frank just smiles shakily and says, "You know how sick I get."

 

Brian knew Frank got sick before his own matches, and it's surprising and touching to learn that Frank's nerves extend to Jamia's fights as well. He shakes out cigarettes for both of them, and they watch the fight fans file in, buzzing with anticipation. The marquee says NESTOR-SALPETER, TEN ROUNDS, and beneath it, THE CHICAGO SHOWDOWN OF THE YEAR. Inside, the first fight on the card is already under way, two kids from the suburbs playing rope-a-dope.

 

"This is a big deal night, huh," says Brian, and immediately wishes he hadn't. Frank nods, looking greenish.

 

When Frank and Brian return to the dressing room, Jamia freezes mid-jumping-jack and says, " _Did you see her?"_

 

"Who?" says Brian, confused.

 

"Salpeter! Hansel-and-Gretel!" 

 

"No," says Brian. "I don't think so. Would I know her?"

 

Jamia sighs, exasperated, but Brian doesn't get to hear her answer because Worm comes in right then, and the whole room falls silent.

 

"Good evening, everyone," he says, sonorously. "It's a beautiful night for an asskicking. May I speak with you, Jay."

 

Worm and Jamia sit down on the couch and everybody else kind of stands around not looking at them. Bob is mixing his adrenaline, cutting it with thrombin for heavy bleeding, his movements steady and precise. 

 

Worm says, "Jay. You've worked hard to be ready for this night, and I think you are ready."

 

Jamia nods.

 

"I don't need to tell you," says Worm, "How important tonight is. Ivarsson's the big time, the big fish, and Miss Salpeter is a formidable and worthy opponent."

 

"I won't let you down," says Jamia.

 

"My dear, you can't," says Worm, gently and firmly. "No matter how it ends, you won't have let me down. Now," he says, producing a roll of gauze. "May I have the honor of wrapping your hands on this illustrious night?"

 

Jamia nods, holds them out, palms down, fingers together and thumbs spread. She doesn't speak. 

 

"Thank you," says Worm, simply, and he begins wrapping, with all the care and tenderness of a mother swaddling her baby.

 

Brian looks at the floor, and then over at Bob. He feels choked up, silly and emotional, like making a declaration of some kind.

 

Jamia walks to her fight between Worm and Bob, Frank and Brian behind her. It's a slow procession. Out in the corridor, the sound of the audience upstairs echoing and magnifying between the concrete walls, Jamia bounces, jumps in place, turns around in circles, skips backwards and forwards, feints and jabs. She speaks silently, fast punches of breath, not meeting anyone's eyes. Brian watches her, fascinated. It's as if she's left herself behind, the sweet, sarcastic, easy-going Jamia of everyday retiring into some kind of hibernation. She's become a machine, a thing intoxicated with its own powerfulness.

 

Frank and Brian hang back as they walk, giving her space. Frank, nauseous, spits and spits on the concrete floor. Worm and Bob stop and start with Jamia in silence, stepping out of the way of her fists. They look at her with tenderness and amusement and admiration and envy, like sober people looking at someone else tripping on a drug whose magical, self-annihilating effect they are all too familiar with. 

 

A fight looks different from the ring, the lights brighter, the audience louder. Brian stays behind Bob, watches him take out his gauze and tape. Worm puts his hands on Jamia's shoulders, speaks to her gently. In the opposite corner, Salpeter is pacing and bouncing, her tiedback hair shining in the ring lights. She looks sleek and fierce, like a creature from a fairytale, sly and mighty. _Miss Hansel-and-Gretel_. Someone who must be Ivarsson, a longlimbed, blond woman, looks over at Worm and smiles at him, cocks two fingers like a gun, aims and fires. Worm smiles and shrugs, amiable, and then glances at Brian, sees his bemusement. "We go back," he says, in explanation.

 

The announcer calls the fighters to the center of the ring. As Jamia ducks under the ropes, Frank leans forward, fast, says, "Hey! Weak right!" Jamia smiles at him, wide and reassuring. 

 

The ref holds both fighters' fists up, calls out their names and their fight records, and they touch gloves. The first round is slow, lowcontact, as they feel each other out. Jamia starts out cautiously, defensively, and Salpeter is looser, takes more risks. They amp it up gradually, as each of them get a few good hits in. By round three Jamia is sweating hard, spitting out her mouthguard and guzzling water. "Jesus! she's fast," she says to Worm. "She's too fucking fast."

 

"Let her be fast," says Worm. He's working the stool and the bucket, which he makes a point of doing at all his fighters' matches. "Let her tire herself out, don't get flustered. Set it up, knock it down, set it up, knock it down."

 

Salpeter is refusing the stool, standing in her corner sipping water cool as you please. "Bitch," says Frank, hot and anxious in Brian's ear, but somehow Jamia hears, cause she twists around and looks at him, annoyed. "Shut the fuck up," she says, spitting her water toward him. Frank glares and mutters, rebellious. 

 

Sixth round Salpeter slams Jamia on the ropes with a left hook, hammers her til the ref intercedes, and Bob has to pack with thrombin to stop the bleeding. He's chewing gum, eyes narrow and intent, and Brian watches him tilt Jamia's face up to the light, watches the steadiness of his fingers. Brian suddenly thinks, startled, _there's a good chance I will grow old with this person_.

 

In the seventh round, Jamia puts Salpeter in a clinch, and when the ref separates them, she comes back furiously, forcing Salpeter backwards with a barrage of tight, focused jabs. In the eighth they drop the pace a little, circling, saving for the last stretch. In the ninth, they both go all out. Jamia pounds Salpeter, coming at her like a freight train and sticking to her hard so she can't use her speed, her longer reach. Salpeter's on the defensive for the first time, but the shots she gets in are brutal. Jamia hits the canvas twice, makes the count each time, but barely. 

 

Even Salpeter seems worn down after that round, and their cut guy has to race to fix her up, though Ivarsson still looks utterly unconcerned. Worm crouches in front of Jamia's stool while she drinks and murmurs, "Remember, Jay, you're not punching her, you're punching _through_ her. She's air, she's not even there. Right through her, okay? Right through her."

 

Jamia wins by a point and a half in the last minute of the last round. It's so close that Brian is confused about who won, unable to make out the blare of the loudspeakers, until the judges call it and the ref walks Jamia out to the center of the ring. Worm and Ivarsson shake hands, and Jamia and Salpeter hug, fierce and lingering, stumbling and squeezing like they will never let go, dazed. Then Jamia ducks under the ropes and barrels into Frank, and they both start crying, faces smushed together, Jamia glowing and sweaty.

 

"Hey," says Bob, in Brian's ear, nudging his side. "C'mon, let's go."

 

"Okay," says Brian, his voice lost in the noise of the crowd.

 

They wait outside under the marquee glow for Jamia and Frank and Worm to come out, after Jamia gets her check from the boxing commission. Bob grins at Brian, and Brian palms at the back of his neck. They don't speak. They listen to the people filing out recount the fight to each other: Salpeter's massive hook in the sixth round, how Jamia rallied in the ninth. It's already acquiring the mythic stature of a great fight; the sweet symmetry of it doesn't seem like something Brian could have just watched with his own eyes.

 

When Jamia comes out she's strutting, in her satin jacket with _Nestor_ on the back, gloves in the air. She spots Bob and says, "Bobbbbbbb! Victory piggyback!"

 

Bob shrugs, holds his arms out, makes a face of pretend resignation. Jamia takes a running start, scrambles up, bending Bob double before he recovers. 

 

"Who's faster than Greta Salpeter?" she shouts, at the cars in the street, the fight fans milling around. "Who hits harder than Greta Salpeter?"

 

"That would be you," says Bob.

 

"Fuck yeah," says Jamia. "I want onion rings." 

 

They go to a diner. Frank lies and says it's Jamia's birthday, and she gets a plate of waffles with candles. Brian sits across from Bob, watches him watch Jamia, the sweetness and affection and pride in his eyes. He is not envious of her at all, of how much easier this is for her than for him, of the luck of her body not failing her. Bob catches Brian's eye and their toes knock together beneath the table. Bob says, "Thanks for coming out, Schechter."

 

"Whatever," says Brian. "I knew this kid before I knew you. I knew she was going places."   



	6. Chapter 6

The last fight of Bob's that Brian went to was in Columbus; it was on the weekend so he drove down for it. That was the night Bob lost by knockout for the first time in his career, to a fighter named Jack Morris from Georgia; second round, brutal. 

 

Brian knew how much it meant to Bob that he'd never lost by KO. "BC Bryar, never been down," Worm would say to pump him up before fights, and Bob would grin his head-ducking grin, say, "Hell, yeah." Morris was six years younger than Bob, a beautiful machine, with a reputation for being able to punch through concrete. Bob got his fights with pretty much the opposite rep, that he could take just about anything any fighter dished out and stay standing, come back steady. 

 

When he was an amateur fighter, before Worm took him under his wing, he got a lot of fights as what promoters call an "opponent," a fighter with little chance of winning a match, bribed or tricked into going up against better, more experienced fighters to boost their records. Bob took any fight he could get when he was a free agent, and his amateur record was shit, riddled with losses from spectacularly unfair fights, the main reason why no pro trainer would take him on for so long. 

 

Brian got the feeling that from time to time Bob still took on fights that a fighter with shrewder judgment would refuse, not out of hubris or desperation, as would usually be the case, but from the same stubborn impulse that prevented him from accepting Duke's illness as terminal or from choosing to have the surgery on his wrists, that same willful blindness to the unfairness of the world.

 

If Brian had been able to watch the Columbus fight with detachment, he would have had to have admitted that it was pretty spectacular, thrilling and agonizing in that way a fight is when there is no clearly predictable outcome, when the possibility of victory hinges on every single punch. For a while it seemed it might go Bob's way, but it turned out Morris was only restraining himself, waiting for Bob's wrists to tire, his hands to go numb.

 

After it was over, Brian chainsmoked a pack of Marlboros out on the rainy Columbus street before he could make himself go back inside. Bob and Morris were sitting in a corner, talking, their people hovering on all sides, Worm behind Bob's left shoulder. The two fighters' heads were bent close together, to hear each other through the noise and echo of the room. Morris was explaining something, gesticulating with one half-wrapped hand, and Bob was listening. 

 

Outside of the ring, Morris looked nowhere near as fearsome, but Brian still wanted to kill him, dismantle him, tear him apart: a calm, irrefusable urge. Bob looked like shit, like he'd lost a ten-round fight with a brick wall. He couldn't see through his right eye, and Cortez was sitting next to him, switching out the compresses unobtrusively. Bob already had his right wrist brace on, and that arm was resting on his knee at an awkward angle. 

 

Brian stood and watched them talk and smelled the sharp bleach smell of blood being cleaned up off the ring, the stench of sweat and testosterone. He listened to the buzz of people's voices as they came down off their vicarious high, the moment when their flesh, flooded with endorphins, had become the flesh of the victor, when they had felt their sinews stretch to the shape of the clean punch that had knocked Bob down and out. He watched Morris rest his hand on Bob's shoulder, explaining something, emphatic, and he watched Bob nod in attentive agreement.

 

Bob and Worm and Cortez had rooms at a Holiday Inn in Columbus, but Brian drove all the way back to Chicago that night, even though it was late. Standing there watching Bob bloody and vanquished, Brian had hated him, briefly, because this was everything Bob loved, and Bob was never going to give it up. Even when he couldn't fight anymore, he would never really give it up, and Brian would never be permitted the thing that he secretly, wordlessly longed for, which was for Bob to be completely and unreservedly his. 

 

He smoked and drove and smoked and drove through the Midwest night, pulling off the highway and leaning his head against the steering wheel, pressing his palms against the ceiling of the car. He scared sleepy kids at rest stops, walking up and down, bouncing on his heels, energy humming through him like a looped circuit, nowhere to go. Bob didn't call. Brian thought about going home and packing a suitcase before Bob got back from Columbus, going to Ballato’s and Gerard’s, sleeping on their couch, beneath the pictures they drew for each other and pinned up on their wall. Or to Travis and Pete's, their refrigerator magnet love letters, or Frank and Jamia's, the easy, sibling-like accord of people who've been together forever. 

 

When they were both back in Chicago, Brian said, “It was a good fight, you did good,” not knowing how to say what he really meant, which was, _it kills me to see you lose_ , because he knew Bob would take that as a reproach. 

 

Bob shook his head, said, “I shouldn’t have fought Morris, Worm was right.” 

 

Brian couldn’t look at him, at his right eye still swollen shut, so he said, “You did good,” again, and Bob nodded, accepting, the way he did when it wasn’t worth it to argue. After that, Brian always had a reason not to go to Bob’s fights, and Bob never pushed, because it would have embarrassed to him to have shown that he cared that much about it. 

 

*

 

The night after Jamia's fight, Brian wakes up from a dream about work, one of those anxiety-ridden dreams where nothing goes the way it’s supposed to. He thinks it has to do with that scene in _Magnolia_ where John C. Reilly loses his gun, which has always stuck in Brian’s mind as a nightmarish plausibility. In the dream he can’t find either his gun or Ballato, and he’s drunk, sluggish and clumsy, and trying to hide it. 

 

When he wakes up, he’s reaching for his holster with one hand and his collar radio with the other, and his hands fumble in the dark, confused. He lies there for a minute before he realizes Bob isn’t in bed, and at first this makes sense, because he wasn’t in the dream, and then Brian wakes up more fully and sees the clock, 2am, and thinks _oh shit, Duke died_ , before he remembers Duke’s already dead, and things in the apartment – the couch, Bob's clothes – have already lost the smell of him, like he was never there at all. 

 

Bob’s in the kitchen, sitting at the table, hands laid out in front of him, palms up, wrists wrapped tightly, cigarette in his mouth. His eyes are red and dry. Brian shuffles over, squinting in the light, pulls Bob’s head to rest against his chest. “Hey,” he says, voice scratchy, “What’s up.” 

 

“Nothing,” says Bob. “Just hurts.” 

 

Brian crouches down next to Bob’s chair. Dixie’s sitting quietly on the other side of him, and they look at each other seriously across Bob’s lap. “Did you take a pill?” asks Brian, rubbing Bob’s thigh comfortingly with one palm. 

 

Bob shakes his head. “Hasn’t been four hours yet,” he says. He’s not looking at Brian, and Brian focuses on his eyelashes, their paleness. Bob is breathing in that careful, shallow way from his chest. His feet are wrapped around the legs of the chair, like a little kid’s. 

 

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” asks Brian. 

 

“Fuck no,” says Bob. His voice is quiet, subdued. He cuts a little look at Brian, and Brian reaches up, takes the cigarette gently from Bob’s mouth, ashes it, puts it back. 

 

“Thanks,” says Bob, around it. 

 

“No problem,” says Brian. He straightens up, pulls another chair over, sits down so their knees are touching. He blinks, swallows a yawn. 

 

Bob smiles, still not looking at him. “Go back to sleep, Schechter,” he says. Brian never gets tired of the way Bob speaks, the soft, self-conscious way he emphasizes certain consonants, _sleep, Schechter_. 

 

“I will,” says Brian. He leans forward, presses his forehead against Bob’s shoulder. Dixie rests her chin on Bob’s knee. They sit there for a while, the three of them. 

 

“This is shit,” says Bob finally. “This is really just shit.” 

 

“I know, buddy,” says Brian. “I know.” 

 

Brian dozes off like that, leaning on Bob, and wakes up slowly a little later to the refrigerator hum, Dixie’s steady pants. He thinks he started dreaming again but it was a different dream, didn’t make him anxious. He sits quietly and tries to remember. Bob turns his head, presses his nose gently against the top of Brian’s head, breathes into his hair. 

 

“Hey,” Brian says into Bob’s sleeve. 

 

“Hey,” Bob says back, soft. 

 

“Hanging in there?” 

 

“Yup.” 

 

“Think you wanna come back to bed?” 

 

Bob pauses, says, “Okay.” 

 

Bob crawls into bed, hugs a pillow to his chest, and Brian lies down behind him, wraps his arms around him, hooks his feet over Bob’s ankles, dozes. Every now and then he wakes up and listens to Bob’s breathing, steady and shallow. 

 

“What time is it?” Bob finally asks, voice hushed. 

 

Brian leans up and looks. “Almost four.” He rubs his palm over Bob’s belly. “Is it pill time?” 

 

“Yeah,” says Bob. 

 

“I got it,” says Brian, kissing Bob’s shoulder and sitting up. He goes into the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet, shakes out a Percocet. He thinks about taking one, like he always does, just one. Bob wouldn’t notice, and Brian’s been clean long enough that one pill would be enough, would give him that warm loose feeling, like he was separate from the world, in a cave of comfort. He looks at himself in the mirror, rubs at his eyes. His alarm’s gonna go off in twenty minutes, and then there’s the cold and the dark and the drive to the station, the kindness in Ballato's crinkly eyes, her sharpness bracing him. 

 

He brings Bob the pill and a glass of water, crawls back in next to him and waits for the alarm. 

 

* 

 

The guy in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart’s name is Donnie. He’s sitting on the trunk of his car, heels resting defiantly on the bumper. 

 

“We hear you’re around a lot,” Ballato remarks. “Any particular reason why that’s so?” 

 

The call came from one of the Wal-Mart cart kids, who was getting creeped out by the consistency of Donnie’s presence in the southwest quadrant of the parking lot, and by the constant stream of people who park in the space next to him, chat through the window, and then drive away again. 

 

“Scenic,” says Donnie. 

 

“You’re a charmer,” says Ballato. “Mind if we have a look in your car?” 

 

“I don’t think I gotta let you do that,” remarks Donnie. 

 

“No,” agrees Schechter. “You might wanna consider it though, just so we don’t bring you in for loitering and impound your car. It might save everybody some trouble in the long run.” 

 

Donnie thinks about this. “You people couldn’t save me any trouble if your lives depended on it,” he says, but he climbs down from the trunk with the air of a man unbowed by defeat. 

 

Schechter stands next to Donnie, and they watch as Ballato checks the glove compartment, under the seats. She pops the trunk and Donnie sighs through his nose, exaggeratedly. 

 

“Nice one, Donnie,” says Ballato, leaning up out of the trunk, shaking the plastic wrapper filled with the tiny red circles of Sudafed pills. The trunk is full of them, a little ocean of punch-out pill sheets. “Are these for your operation? Or are you selling them?” 

 

“I don’t have an operation,” says Donnie doggedly. 

 

“Just a hell of a sinus problem,” agrees Ballato kindly, slamming the trunk. “Alright, Schechter. Let’s get her done.” 

 

On the drive back to the station Donnie and Schechter talk about the Cubs. He’s an older dude, in his sixties, bald, and the crown of his head under Brian’s palm when he helped him into the back of the cruiser felt dry and warm, like a baby’s. On their way to lunch, Ballato asks, “Think Donnie’s got something going in his basement?” 

 

“Nah,” says Brian. He’s thinking about what he’s gonna eat. “He’s not even on the stuff, didn’t talk like a tweaker. It’s just a gig.” He thinks about how relaxed Donnie was about the whole situation, how being arrested didn’t even seem like a big-deal part of his day. That always amazes Brian, how people can adapt so easily to the reality they live in, wrap its rules around them, become accustomed. 

 

He says something like this to Bob, at lunch. Next to him, Ballato pushes her straw around her banana smoothie, sketches something on a napkin, preoccupied. 

 

“It’s just a game,” shrugs Bob, sitting across from them. He was doing roadwork with Jamia that morning, and his skin shines lightly like it always does after he runs, part sweat, part endorphins, the back of his neck still flushed red. “You know, like the fight game. Everything’s a game.” 

 

“Uh-huh,” says Schechter. He doesn’t like that word much, _game_. He thinks about how the sheet of Sudafed sold out of Donnie’s trunk turns into meth made in a warehouse or basement that turns into somebody’s kid or somebody’s parent leaving their lives behind, walking out on them like you walk out of a room, and never finding their way back. 

 

It doesn’t feel much like a game to Schechter, but maybe that’s because he plays it every day, and it never feels like one from the inside. 

 

“I didn’t mean it like that, dude,” says Bob. Brian looks up at his eyes, crinkling at the corners, and realizes Bob’s just read his face like a street sign again. It makes him feel embarrassed, unsettled, exposed. “Not a game like it’s not for real. It’s just got its own rules like anything else.” 

 

“Yeah, okay,” says Schechter. “Whatever, punkass.” 

 

Bob is eating the french fries off Ballato’s plate, dipping them in his smoothie. Ballato looks up and exclaims at this, without venom, moves her plate. She shows them what she’s been sketching: Bob in his ring gear, long golden hair like Rapunzel, about seven feet tall, looking like a Norse pirate. 

 

Bob says, “Oh Jesus,” laughs that sharp sudden soundless laugh that rocks his whole body forward with the force of it, glances up at Ballato, eyes bright. “What the fuck.” He flips the napkin over, facedown, slaps his palm on top of it decisively. 

 

“That’s going in the comic book I’ll never write, for sure,” says Ballato, taking a long satisfied slurp of her smoothie. 

 

“Don’t you dare,” says Bob. 

 

“It’s done, it’s a done deal.” Ballato slides her shades down, adjusts her belt with a jangle. “Ready to rock and roll, Schechter?” 

 

“As I’ll ever be,” says Brian, throwing down his napkin. “I’ll see you tonight,” he says to Bob, and Bob nods, salutes Brian silently with two fingers, his eyes still bright with amusement. 

 

They walk out of the diner into the bright cold Chicago sunlight. Ballato’s making obnoxious noises with the straw and the last of the smoothie in her plastic cup, and Brian says, “Quit that. Quit that,” without rancor. He liked her drawing, Bob larger than life, glowing fiercely like a meteor, but he’d never tell either her or Bob that. 

 

They get in the cruiser and drive. Nothing’s coming in right now, and Brian looks out the window at the sun on the cars and thinks about nothing in particular. He thinks about the other night when he was in the kitchen and Bob was in the living room, and he heard Bob talking to Dixie, saying, “What is that? What the fuck are you doing? Stop it, stop it.” Dixie barked back sassily and Brian could clearly see the goofy love in both their faces as they looked at each other, see it like it was in front of him. 

 

He thinks about Jamia surrounded by the glow of her victory, eating a stack of waffles with pink birthday candles stuck in them. He thinks about Worm on his night flight from Detroit, and Travis’s kid with her purple sloth, and Travis. He thinks about the way the sunlight glints off Travis's hair and how one day when he took Brian to a meeting, when they came back out his car wouldn’t start, and he sat there frowning in perplexity for a minute, and then just started laughing and laughing, and Brian laughed too, and they couldn’t look at each other without laughing more, and the laughter hurt, like sandpaper in the cave of Brian’s chest, and Brian thought, startled, _I am actually feeling this_. _This is what is real_. He thinks about him and Bob, the weird way their lives fit together now like Lego pieces, this perfect stranger, and what if Brian had never watched him stitch his face up in Cortez's kitchen three years ago, where and what would Brian be now? 

 

He looks over at Ballato and she grins at him, her smile opening up her whole face like someone flinging open a door, just the opposite of Bob’s sly, sweet, secret grin. Brian grins back. 

 

 

\----

 

 

thank you for reading. feel free to tell me stuff i need to know.


End file.
